Phantom Jobs are a step in the right direction but need iteration.

[RaionKansen]

I personally think outside of them being easy to use, it is extremely boring and uninspiring to have the phantom jobs currently as it is. There is no experimentation or change of pace as with the logograms of Eureka or Bozja that made them unique and fun to use. It seems they are afraid of things getting too powerful and have decided to tune down the system as a whole. What they should of done is improve the system they currently had and made it better but instead we got this system which feels kind of barebones.

Man people really have rose-tinted glasses with Eureka and Bozja.
None of the actions were interesting. It was just passives or buffs to do silly damage, which is pretty much what phantom jobs are. There were some niche actions in Eureka that you used to level grind, but that's it.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I've said it in other thread but I'll say it here again:

Logos/Lost Actions felt like designed to be out of wack, imbalanced, experimental, and silly, perfect for a content that's supposed to be segregated from the rest of their 'safe' regular main content outside. Phantom Jobs felt like designed to be as inoffensive & not as much of an interference to EW/DT savage raiding practice, which amounts to combinations of: keep 1m/2m on cooldown, press and forget button, dump highest potency gcds/actions into raidbuff windows, and minimal consideration.

I mean, how dare I'm able to replace tanks as a drunkard DNC or rip aggro with 7m misery.. or god forbid scare my healer by being a paper, glass cannon tank, I guess... :P

They should've stopped at turning the system into one-time acquisition, instead they double down to make everything look more and more like the mainline content.

[VeyaAkemi]

Do people really have trouble with lost actions?

Personally, I always found keeping myself supplied with a steady supply of Deep Aetherweaver/Deep Profane to be a total pain in the ass, and Becoming is one of the more costly fragments, at 20k gil-ish a pop, Masteries are cheaper at 4k-ish, but still a cost, this has always been a big frustration about Bozja and I have looked at Bozja with a "...not right now" mood before because I was running low, didn't feel like playing something else, and getting more is so costly/time-intensive.

[IdleBlood]

Multiple threads for say the same things the same players, bit annoying...

[Fawkes]

There was no issue with Lost Actions.

However, casual players were not smart enough to use them or understand them. So they went into DR without them and DR took 40-60 minutes instead of 20 minutes. The bosses took so long that it was miserable and made me not want to do it again. The fights themselves were really good, yet the lack of action usage was that bad.

A benefit of Phantom Jobs is it's something casual players are far more likely to grasp.

False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

[CarlCarl]

False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

You say this, but in practise only top loadouts really required actual investment. Simple loadouts like essence of the skirmisher + banner of whoopdedoo already significantly increase your DPS. The required Awakening (dropped by 4 fates, the questline, and a stupid amount of mobs) and Resolve (dropped by questline and in packs of 10 from BSF z3 CEs) fragments really did not require much effort on the player's part to acquire. The fact that even such simple loadouts were already relatively uncommon despite the ease of acquisition shows that the problem was a mismatch between developer expectations and casual players. The moment you can click a subjob and immediately get buttons on your hotbar to press, there was no more problem at all.

[Jeeqbit]

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates

For the most part, certain mobs dropped certain fragments, so they were very easy to farm. You could form parties to do it or reflect farm. In fact some party members would do this while you were doing other things, giving you fragments in the process.

Another option was to get Lost Doom and spam it on a boss. Eventually it would 1 shot them and you'd get loads of fragments.

Of course, many other fragments could simply be bought with clusters or looted from CLL.

And finally, for the ones you couldn't get, you could simply go to the market board and buy them.

on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil

Maybe they could have not bothered with the Appraisal system and maybe they should avoid that if they do it again, but the rest was fine in my opinion. 100 billion is an exaggeration though. There were some rare ones, but at least when the content was current (pre-Echo where it was more useful), prices were lower.

[Supersnow845]

I happen to really like time mage on PCT for the sole reason that Occult Quick lets me cast my motifs while moving in a CE. Swiftcast comet isn't the best available damage option overall, but it is the quickest way to generate credit if you're late for a fate out of all the options other than throwing money at it. Slowga is... less good since gold farming can be done easily with a cannons party, but if for some reason you can't get one of those together, it can make less efficient farms much less stressful.

Thief really got shafted by Occult Sprint not being 100% uptime. Pilfer Weapon is not terrible from a debuff standpoint as it stacks with the already existing reductions, but it's also unnecessary mitigation in current content. Not sure why you say that about ranger. Occult Featherfoot is great utility for any content and Occult Unicorn is basically Shake It Off on any class you want. Falcon is objectively pointless outside of Forked, though. It'd be nice if it could be used on static elements in CEs. I'd hoped it could be used on the rocks in On the Hunt or maybe the idols in from Times bygone, but nope.

Just a note here comet is the best damage option overall for any class using time mage, no class has an attack stronger than comet so it should always be prioritised

False.

The problem was acquisition. Some of the fragments had terrible droprates, and on top of that RNG you had another layer of RNG with the appraisal system. So you could farm 100 fragments and only end up with 10 of the essence you wanted. Casual players didn't want to spend 40 hours a week farming fragments just to be able to do the raid twice, or buy them off the AH for 100 billion gil only to appraise into useless garbage. If the droprate wasn't crap and there were more fragments in the economy than anyone needed then casuals would've been able to use them more. But some people are too greedy and wanted them to be rare and valuable so they could farm them and make money, and the content itself suffered and now the pendulum swung all the way in the other direction so there aren't logograms/fragments to worry about at all and we get less interesting actions to go with it.

This was a common misconception. You didn’t need anything that was rare to do a significant amount of damage. People weren’t asking for excellence deep profane and lost font of magic to run a zone 1 skirmish. People were just saying when aetherweaver fragments cost 30 Gil on the marketboard you can afford to not use platebearer”

[fulminating]

Man people really have rose-tinted glasses with Eureka and Bozja.
None of the actions were interesting. It was just passives or buffs to do silly damage, which is pretty much what phantom jobs are. There were some niche actions in Eureka that you used to level grind, but that's it.

The silly damage is the carrot, the stick is breakdancing and not hitting the boss or using your dashes as a gauge builder or using your mitigations on raidwides and praying that you don’t snag aggro or that the other 3 healers in your party who instantly activated an essence aren’t also all profane and so on. It’s about how the older iterations interacted with the kit and how insular the phantom subjobs are by comparison.

[Fawkes]

This was a common misconception. You didn’t need anything that was rare to do a significant amount of damage. People weren’t asking for excellence deep profane and lost font of magic to run a zone 1 skirmish. People were just saying when aetherweaver fragments cost 30 Gil on the marketboard you can afford to not use platebearer”

People were absolutely requiring the best DPS essences for PF DR runs, and blacklisting people who didn't use them. Because you had to run it FIFTEEN TIMES PER WEAPON, and there was almost an hour difference in completion time between people using them or not.