What’s the point when BLM’s newfound success is PCT and SMN’s loss?

[Jeeqbit]

It's been this way for a long time though.

DRK release = less of the other tanks
PLD revamp in Stormblood that made it high DPS at first = WAR mains finally stopped hating on PLD and switched
DRK higher DPS than WAR and PLD in EW = people switched to DRK suddenly despite that it's a "shadow" of its former self

Mathematically people have to come from one job to another in order for the other job to grow in population, because new players take time to join the game whereas existing players do not.

I remember the lesson that we all learned in Stormblood with PLD was: there will always be a flavor of the month depending on which jobs are the highest DPS. The only thing SE can do to prevent this is to take it in turns to buff different ones higher each patch, and to try and not make them overall that different in damage output.

[Kohashi]

Healing=shields/mitigation

You don’t really think I meant pure healing did you. Like no need to be so aggressive. SCH dominates its units ability to bend mitigation plans around it

Regardless this wasn’t the point of my topic, if you just want to argue with me I’d rather not

I am not sure what's worse, you reducing every single ability to heal, or trying to make yet another post with little to no understanding of why a certain shift did happen.

In regard to VPR, you are wrong yet again. If you look at m5, m7, and m8, there are other melee being favored instead of VPR. VPR is king in m6s, simply because of how their skills work and how effective they are in the add phase.

Also PCT is not a wonky mess. The only thing that changed was the prio on some spells. Hammer ended up falling a lot in prio, and now is mostly used as a neutral movement spell rather than being essential in the burst phase.

[Aco505]

I can also point out that VPR’s numbers shot up this patch at the expense of NIN considering VPR’s ridiculous numbers are arguably worse than 7.1 PCT was

VPR is getting carried by M6S. In the previous tier, it was also up during the first weeks and then it went down and down as the patch went by because of everyone getting BiS and kill times getting closer to 2-minute windows. VPR's ease to deal with downtime could also be helping it right now in these first weeks when most people are progging and playing safe.

However, I disagree that VPR's current situation is worse than PCT's. PCT was either best or at worst great in every piece of content across all or most levels whereas VPR has content, such as Ultimates, in which it's one of the worst performers. VPR's kit is also bare bones at lower levels, so much so that one of their defining traits, Uncoiled Fury, is learned quite late at level 82.

In any case, just like with your previous post on SMN, the answer is that players tend to switch to the path of least resistance. If it also offers good damage, all the better. SMN was the pick in EW because it was easy and good at everything except damage, in which it wasn't bad anyway. It was, in fact, the caster that provided the most damage in 2-minute buffs. The only other downside it had was a non-existent skill ceiling, but sadly many players simply don't care about this.

The issue with SE is not necessarily the balance mishaps but that now PCT players are going to wait an uncertain amount of months until they decide to fix the hammer potencies and anything else the job might need. If they overshot BLM to EW levels of broken, then the same applies and we will likely see no more balance changes till 7.3. Just like in EW, MCH will probably linger in the dumps until later patches, as well.

Whether SE has any objective in this or just go by using their internal statistics as a guide... no one can really know.

[Supersnow845]

^again im not sure how else to phrase this post because whether PCT is bad or not has literally nothing at all to do with the point I’m trying to make (I only put it as an aside because it may be a contributing factor though I doubt it is) nor does MCH continuing to be bad.

Whenever square does reworks on classes they do them because they are unpopular by and large. This was their justification for 6.0 SMN, it was their justification for 7.0 AST, it was their justification for 5.4, 6.0 AND 7.0 MNK and we know they haven’t been happy with BLM’s population numbers.

What’s the point of doing a rework to a job if you “make a job popular” by simply pumping up its numbers when you simplify it then declare it’s a success because people like to play meta classes.

My point is where is this going? Is it time to rework SMN again because it’s unpopular (I don’t want to hear about your ideas behind leviathan shiva and ramuh), if they buffed PCT and BLM went down would BLM’s rework be considered a failure. I simply do not see where this job design is going since the only thing they ever seem to base it on is how popular a job is

[mallleable]

I think they want PCT, and BLM to be attracting similar players so if play rate numbers shift or even swapped between them while the combined number stays the same it might be fine in their eyes. BLM seems to have attracted a lot of new players so it's a matter of how many stick with the job.

The more egregious issue is SMN, and phys ranged. SMN has a lot of design issues that need to be fixed. BRD, and especially MCH are not great this tier so that leaves DNC as the strongest phys ranged option, and the imbalance is compounded by the fact that DNC perfectly synergizes with VPR, one of the strongest melees.

[Aco505]

My point is where is this going? Is it time to rework SMN again because it’s unpopular (I don’t want to hear about your ideas behind leviathan shiva and ramuh), if they buffed PCT and BLM went down would BLM’s rework be considered a failure. I simply do not see where this job design is going since the only thing they ever seem to base it on is how popular a job is

SMN is popular, just not in high end content. Any justification they use will simply be smoke bombs unless it actually realizes into something. SMN was reworked to create a new base and it got absolutely nothing in DT. It plays the exact same. It's simply fully random whether a job gets something or not.

Kaiten was removed from SAM for nothing when they could've just kept it till DT, and then 7.1 (I think?) gave them the Iaijutsu change that has been widely praised.

Optimal drift MNK was likely unintended in EW, and then in DT they remove their timers in place of the balls. But such balls don't even interact with their AoE, which is still weird because AFAIK you still only use certain AoE weaponskills with more than three targets as it's not worth it otherwise. Same thing happens with NIN's AoE being awful and their new gauge Kazematoi having zero interaction with it.

There's simply no specific roadmap until they show us proof. They promised better battle content in 7.2 and seem to be delivering, for now. They're essentially applying the more experimental design they followed in Criterion. Will this be enough? I personally think they should keep trying to avoid going back to stale content.

The goalpost for jobs is 8.0, but I've said it before: I'll believe it when I see it.

[Supersnow845]

that’s the thing, sure people upload casual logs way less often than they upload high end logs but if you look at SMN’s logs for the level 100 dungeons and juneo it is decidedly not popular. Sure it’s a disaster in high end content but it can’t even claim to be a casual juggernaut like WAR or WHM given the numbers it’s pulling

And that returns to my point. What’s the point of reworking jobs for popularity reasons when you are willing to abandon the job again like 4 seconds later and have its popularity crash. You can see from SMN that the rework didn’t hold popularity. Whether you consider that because it didn’t get anything new (which is arguably the same as any job in 7.0 with few exceptions) or because the novelty wore off I don’t see why square considers this type of change a success. Same as the change to BLM. Its popularity shot up as it’s now the meta caster and is a lot easier to play. If this popularity doesn’t hold (which it likely won’t given SMN and PCT) then what was the point in the first place

How far around does this circular job rework go. I know you aren’t disagreeing with me here by and large, I’m just trying to explain my point as best I can

[Daralii]

I think they want PCT, and BLM to be attracting similar players so if play rate numbers shift or even swapped between them while the combined number stays the same it might be fine in their eyes. BLM seems to have attracted a lot of new players so it's a matter of how many stick with the job.

The more egregious issue is SMN, and phys ranged. SMN has a lot of design issues that need to be fixed. BRD, and especially MCH are not great this tier so that leaves DNC as the strongest phys ranged option, and the imbalance is compounded by the fact that DNC perfectly synergizes with VPR, one of the strongest melees.

SMN also attracted a lot of new players after its redesign because it was incredibly easy while also being very overtuned. Now we have BLM after its rework, which is also much more popular while being incredibly easy and pretty overtuned, whereas SMN's DPS fell behind after EW and it's now dead in a ditch as the least played caster.

[Aco505]

SMN is still the 5th most popular job in Jeuno and mostly equal with RDM. Only VPR and BLM are way ahead popularity-wise.

It does seem to be less played in dungeons but this can be attributed to PCT being busted there and not having the difficulty perception that BLM has always had.

And you say it yourself: only SE really has the statistics on job popularity in every duty.

If 8.0 doesn't set up a clear path to how jobs are going to be played, then the random job rework cycle will simply never end and stay adjusted to either the current content or the whims of the developers.

[AmiableApkallu]

My point is where is this going?

Does anyone really know?

I feel like we're at the point where: Jobs get new abilities every expansion because SE feels obligated to do so. Jobs get adjusted or reworked because some current-expansion encounter metric doesn't look good in the spreadsheets.

Which, okay, fair enough, but it can't be at the expense of things like: What is thematically appropriate for this job? How do we distribute actions across the leveling range so that there aren't huge gaps of awkwardness? How do we make jobs feel different from each other (while still all being viable)?