SE isn't hearing the community RE: Job Feedback & Simplification

[MrJPtheAssassin]

You are wrong to do that, to be honest. I've said so in another post on the general forum, but the gist is
Players have no clue how game design works. So a game designer can never fully take complaints by players at face value, they need to understand the deeper meaning.

People complained that synching up buffs was difficult. What the issue was was not the buff timers themselves, it was that the multiplicative damage calculation and the existence of some skills like trick attack were a black hole that sucked in everyones damage cooldowns because you were gimping your groups damage by not utilizing that. A good game designer would have understood the issues and possibly have implemented a different fix than "make every class' buffs the same".

Another thing that CS3 does is that they just drop things they do not see working right. Fix pet AI? No, its easier to just delete pets altogether. Height variations in Coil T5 were abusable? Better make every arena a perfectly horizontal plane!

And lastly, class buffs and nerfs -> the issue here being that CS3 do not understand their own jobs and game, which is something you can see time and time again. A better PCT nerf would have been moving some potency from motifs to the filler, flattening the damage curve a bit without taking away the unique strengths of the class. Whenever CS3 adjust a class its very much a "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Sometimes they get lucky and something works right, often times things just feel like they were not thought out at all.

So no, please do not subscribe to the fact that its the player's fault. Yes, we complain, but if CS3 are unable to gauge the real issue from our complaints, then that is on them.

You're right, but at the same time, I can't help to have some resentment towards the players who complain about a job(who don't even play the job they're complaining about) leads to the job I really enjoy getting trashed. I was a devoted SMN main when I started this game in SB, I fell in love with the job and enjoy it. I loved it in ShB as well. Then EW happened, all the fun I had in the job, all the years I spent mastering it and getting really good at it, gone. All because ppl who didn't like the job or didn't like learning the job complain about it and the devs then rework it into the game's easiest job that doesn't have anything complex about it. I had to leave the caster role in EW bc of the change and go play RPR.

Now the same thing is happening to PCT. I loved PCT and enjoyed playing a job that felt powerful and fun. Now there is no reason to play PCT. Why play PCT when RDM basically does the same dps and has a rez?

You right, its mostly on the devs BUT I do whole resentment to those who cry about things that honestly didn't really need fixing imo.

[Valence]

I'm pretty convinced that you're not the audience the devs want to design the game for, same as I am not either. They don't want you to think or make choices, they don't want you to have job agency, they want you to follow instructions and dance.

[DivineP]

I'm so sorry to say this bit they won't revert it. I knew BLM would get simplified and PCT nerfed.

I looked into my crystal ball and saw us healers moaning for years and with a 10k post thread and nothings changed.

All I can sadly is welcome to the club newbies.

[Mecia]

I'm pretty convinced that you're not the audience the devs want to design the game for, same as I am not either. They don't want you to think or make choices, they don't want you to have job agency, they want you to follow instructions and dance.

M5's Disco Infernal is such a vapid mechanic but a perfect example of how this direction feels.

[Rithy255]

Enjoy more simplification.

Black mage is more popular then ever, doubt it will last when it's not meta and the brand new fad.

But SE will see it as a success and double down on it.

[Taranok]

M5's Disco Infernal is such a vapid mechanic but a perfect example of how this direction feels.

It's also extremely hard for extremely stupid reasons. Like latency snapshotting nonsense and having a ridiculous pace.

This is what happens when the only way to make things hard is to make things faster and more punishing. Eventually you start adding what used to be ultimate grade mechanics into extreme trials and then wonder why the playerbase starts dropping like flies.

Which mechanic? Bloom 6. If that mechanic actually 1 shot you for doing the holies wrong, it would be an ultimate mechanic perfectly at home in DSR or TOP. It's not the world's hardest mechanic by DT standards, but it is dumb as hell.

Hell, even a quick look at dungeons can see savage-grade mechanics popping in, such as how Field Station has a super cleave of death, which is straight from P5S. And with how the boss moves, it may as well be as hard as the P5S version.

"But the dungeons are casual!" No, this is not casual. This is extremely stupid and will drive players who don't like fast-paced DDR stupidity away. I miss having to actually plan out movement on BLM. Can I have ShB BLM with DT's flare star, bliz 4, timers removed, and paradox so I can actually go back to enjoying caster gameplay?

[Rithy255]

It's also extremely hard for extremely stupid reasons. Like latency snapshotting nonsense and having a ridiculous pace.

This is what happens when the only way to make things hard is to make things faster and more punishing. Eventually you start adding what used to be ultimate grade mechanics into extreme trials and then wonder why the playerbase starts dropping like flies.

Which mechanic? Bloom 6. If that mechanic actually 1 shot you for doing the holies wrong, it would be an ultimate mechanic perfectly at home in DSR or TOP. It's not the world's hardest mechanic by DT standards, but it is dumb as hell.

Hell, even a quick look at dungeons can see savage-grade mechanics popping in, such as how Field Station has a super cleave of death, which is straight from P5S. And with how the boss moves, it may as well be as hard as the P5S version.

"But the dungeons are casual!" No, this is not casual. This is extremely stupid and will drive players who don't like fast-paced DDR stupidity away. I miss having to actually plan out movement on BLM. Can I have ShB BLM with DT's flare star, bliz 4, timers removed, and paradox so I can actually go back to enjoying caster gameplay?

You bring up snap shotting, which is a good point because the more DDR like this game gets, the more obvious how horrible the snap shotting is in this game.

It's like the designed the game around the one thing that they will never fix lol. I wish they focused more on job design instead honestly.

Difficulty to me should partly come in hand with the job, Healers shouldn't be joke roles, Tanks are very hyper defensive with no aggro management, Theirs no DPS jobs like black mage where movement is important to manage anymore, they have to depend so heavily on fight design to carry the lack of Job design at this point, which hurts the game in all tiers of play, we need a balance of both Job and fight design, not one being pushed aside so the other is took to extremes

[Taranok]

You bring up snap shotting, which is a good point because the more DDR like this game gets, the more obvious how horrible the snap shotting is in this game.

It's like the designed the game around the one thing that they will never fix lol. I wish they focused more on job design instead honestly.

Difficulty to me should partly come in hand with the job, Healers shouldn't be joke roles, Tanks are very hyper defensive with no aggro management, Theirs no DPS jobs like black mage where movement is important to manage anymore, they have to depend so heavily on fight design to carry the lack of Job design at this point, which hurts the game in all tiers of play, we need a balance of both Job and fight design, not one being pushed aside so the other is took to extremes

Speaking of healers, healers are completely ruined by the fact that ARR relaunched with WHM so completely and horrifically overpowered that the devs had 2 choices. Either bring SCH (and AST, eventually) up to WHM standards, or nerf WHM. They chose to bring up SCH/AST. Cure 2 is a horrifically overpowered spell. Medica 1 is horrifically overpowered. So what do encounter designers do? Well, eventually the found the single hardest possible heal check. Charybdis into AOE, which was found in god kefka. There is no way to make a harder healing check than that other than to drop that damage down into lower difficulties, which is why every dungeon is a 2-shot and 1 failure is often death, and to make it a lot faster paced, which is tier 2 DT in a nutshell, and also why dungeon mistakes rarely result in anything other than death.

Tanks have the exact same problem though. PLD was the only class that could tank twintania. Launch WAR was its own issues, but it flat couldn't survive death sentence. Why? Because PLD had a 40%, an auto-block (~20%,) and another 20% mit. When you factor that in with the raw mit it had in tank stance of 20%, it could pull off something like 300% EHP. The solution? Turn all tanks into paladin. Vengeance got 30%, inner beast 20% for 6s (lol) and thrill of battle is some 10-15% effective mit. Fast forward to Dawntrail and every tank has functionally the same cooldowns.

My point is mostly that, they went in the opposite direction. They let encounter design dictate job design. Every QOL buff classes got, encounters would claw back. Want to have a 1.5s cast time for oGCDs? Well now every fight has more movement, necessitating every caster having more movement. Fast forward even more and the encounter design just demolished job design and game design.

The problem is, a lot of people love this 'Screw your internet especially' fight design, probably because the job design is so garbage. Tanking with binary pass-fail mechanics and a barebones DPS rotation is, in fact, boring. Healing with 20 separate instant cast free medica 1s and 2s is boring. You can't have HoT healers, or self sustain drain tanks in FFXIV because the encounter design will never allow for it. Everyone is so overpowered that the only way to make fights interesting is to careen them off a cliff.

[Valence]

Almost everything in the current design can be summed up in "binary pass-fail mechanics", body checks only being the upper chunk of the iceberg.
What isn't completely yet it the matter of mitigation, where healers are blamed for failing heal checks in certain savage tiers when in fact, nobody in the party actually mitigated. That's what the dev team has tried to sand down over expansions so that every mistake and death/wipe is immediately renderer clear as day, why and how.

[xbahax92]

My next bet will be Bard. It's probably one of the jobs that has multiple layers to keep an eye on. Debuffs, buff timers, song rotation, gauge bar. I can already see another comment such as:

"Future battle design may cause difficulty with shooting arrows"

I'm gonna enjoy BRD while it lasts.