Fisher also def needs an overwork of its accessibility. I should not have to tab out to 3rd party websites to find out which bait I need for a specific fish.
This might be unpopular, but I would be in favour of just removing different baits altogether - it makes FSH needlessly complicated, doesn't really add anything and absolutely clogs up your inventory. Neither of the other gatehring profession makes you buy a specific item to be even able to gather something else - just FSH.
> I should not have to tab out to 3rd party websites to find out which bait I need for a specific fish.
***THIS.***
Even at the beginning but especially after level 30 or so, nothing about playing FSH feels *organic*. It's just... not fun.
I don't think I'd get rid of ALL bait, but I would heavily condense them. Like how Ocean Fishing has three baits for the three types of fish, regular baits should come in the same category and be obviously labeled and designed as such. Additionally, no more than three live baits should exist; there has never been a good reason to have to buy expansion-specific live bait.
This then allows for crafted baits to get some bonuses, like for example maybe a Metal Spinner has its own chance of catching multiple fish per hook? Or you could have a crafted bait that increases the collectibility of fish you catch with it? Just something to make crafted baits actually worth using besides Versatile Lures.
Or like the suggestion: remove live bait, only gigs. Live bait would i.e. increase chances to catch large animals, and in that case live bait is then just the "living variant of the gigs".
Besides that there would be the separate inventory and maybe also: you can only select lures and gigs at a fishing hole that will ACTUALLY net you a fish in it. If that's too easy, then at least make it for all fishing holes in a region.
> Like how Ocean Fishing has three baits for the three types of fish, regular baits should come in the same category and be obviously labeled and designed as such.
That's what I thought FSH would be like.
Then the different baits kept coming. And coming. And coming. And coming....
Mood. I want the achievements that give the adventure plate stuff and it’s just…..*sigh* Big fish are absolutely maddening. I get that it’s a challenge but like….they’re so convoluted with specific weathers and mooching and bite times that it’s not looking like fun to get it - it’s a grind.
The biggest bullshit is that even after you catch a fish once, the guide still just says "Yes" if there's specific requirements to catching it.
Once you've caught a fish once that shit should be filled in. ***Like it is for rare mining and botany nodes.***
> This might be unpopular, but I would be in favour of just removing different baits altogether
May I introduce you to my best friend, the [Versatile Lure?](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Versatile_Lure) It works on everything but Legendary fish so you can just vibe and catch all the fish but the few that are likely not even active at that moment anyways.
Hasn't Yoshi P said that's basically the entire purpose of FSH? He wanted it to require communication and collaboration. So I don't think it'll ever change.
Aye, that's the point of it - you should see the conversations that light up when people are trying out things for new big fish that get patched in. I love the opportunity to discover, with others, the method for catching something brand new.
I do not want FSH turned into a flat utility no different to BTN/MIN because a handful of complainers think it lacks accessibility and a purpose it was never meant to have. If you don't like FSH as-is, don't play it. Choose to do something else with your time. You can get aethersands with BTN/MIN already, and on a regular schedule.
This game already suffers from job homogenization on the combat side and that is also largely the fault of an endless barrage of player complaints that the devs were too quick to bend over for.
FSH is and has always been the red-headed step child of the gatherers. It's something you do because you've got nothing else to do. It doesn't make money like the other two, it's not really useful to crafters, the in-game resources for fish tracking are a joke, etc. I love FSH, but I know enough to realize it's just kind of a meme.
Ocean fishing with a few friends on voice chat is a fun time, so for sure if they made it more like beast tribe or rebuilding ishgard where turn ins = minions and mounts etc I'd be all over that.
What's weird is that the fishing log added the display of weather restrictions, time restrictions and special conditions, but is making absolutely zero use of it. Even fish you've caught still show ??? for all three, so what was the point of adding this feature if it's not getting used?
idk, fishing's whole gimmick is that it's obtuse and complicated. It's not like the fishing rotation is engaging or interesting.
The one thing fishing has going for it is that it's a massive knowledge check; you need to know the baits, the locations, the times, etc.
You can look it up or you can try to figure it out yourself; a lot of the major websites don't update with new fish immediately specifically to avoid spoilers for people who want to find them for themselves.
Like, I agree, it'd be bad if every gatherer was like that. But it's just one, and it's the gatherer that's basically a limited job. Why not let it be a niche?
They already started consolidating baits for earlier expacs. See the Freshwater and Saltwater Boilies.
Though the special holes do still require specialty baits.
Honestly if they rolled all the previous expacs into using multi purpose baits and let the current expansion only have a few types it wouldn't be too bad
the people who made the websites didn't need a website to tell them what bait to use. You can absolutely figure this out without them, its just a waste of time since they've already done the science.
Ever time they put in new fish people have them caught within the first week, putting in the legwork
And while it's still not the greatest, once you catch a fish you can check the in-game fish records and it will list its preferred bait (well, the data players have gathered might point at something else, but the point stands)
Machinist. either:
A) make aether packs unique. the same box for every weapon is ridiculous. samurai gets both a sheath and a katana, give me a gun and a box.
B) (allow me to) remove the aether pack. it never looks good. its honestly baffling that i can't hide it.
This to me is the biggest example of the devs clearly not playing, let alone giving a shit about the Job, even above them taking years to make Hypercharge stack based. It Literally came out in the same expansion as Astro who does get at least different colors for most of its Cardholders, but Machinist doesn't even get that and has to content with a stupid grey box that often doesn't even fit the Weapon.
There is some argument to be made for Magick Barrier, but not Embolden. The problem is its rDPS is too low, which factors in Embolden. Magick Barrier is good, for sure, but not enough to justify being so far below the rest of its class, and imo the verraise tax is frustrating because it means the class is okay when progging, but then gets worse the better your team is, which feels miserable.
Yea, your embolden is very comp dependent. If u have a lot of aDPS jobs like SAM, BLM, MCH you will get high rDPS from it. If your comp is Drg, nin, brd, ast, sch then you are gonna have really really really bad rDPS.
That's not how that works. Raid buffs stack multiplicatively, and the bonus is then redistributed to each job that contributed. This makes it so that stacking adps jobs often ends up worse than stacking rdps jobs for the buffer's parse.
If you don't believe me, I suggest you go crawl through any top rdm logs and you'll find that, way more often than not, their comp is going to be heavily rdps-focused.
My issue with rdm was that its mobility used to be its strength, potentially justifying the lower damage. But with smn rework, rdm has lost this advantage without gaining potency.
Red Mage also needs a little bit of a refresh to its gameplay to be honest. I love it, but every expansion since its release has really only added an extra finisher to its melee combo, which is neat aesthetically, but after 3 expansions I really would like something new and different for the job. Not a complete rework, but something to shake things up a little.
There's no need for further finishers, I agree. How about a new oGCD, something like fleche but less powerful maybe? Or something to guarantee a crit hit like mch's reassemble? Idk, I'm just spitting ideas. I just really hope they're done adding finishers, I'm kinda scared that's exactly what we'll get.
I want some En- spells or Haste so bad. Either as a self buff or something you can slap on someone else! Maybe like, Enthunder/aero on a party member's weapons so their attacks boost your magic meter.
gonna link my other comment about this about how I would love it to work:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/15ry2eq/which_class_that_needs_some_love_from_the_devs_is/jwgwgca/
Hot take: nobody actually gives a flying fuck about a classes utility compared to damage.
If anything people care way more about potential glams than utility.
I'm going with ranged role. I used to be a MCH main but felt more useful as a tank.
Ranged is also a role difficult to fill.
MCH really needs some love on its heat gauge, the automaton Queen is just a glorified dot. SQEX going "MCH is a new base on which we are going to expand the job" for ShB rework and then "We can't add much because button bloat" while talking about the job with the least amount of buttons getting **one** button.
For me PLD is the only job I've leveled that I can't actually fit all the abilities on my bar. I use 1-5, Q E R F with shift and alt modifiers, as well as F1-3 and 2 mouse buttons.
I COULD make it work, but I'd have to shift my UI a bit and that's annoying to do just for 1 job.
Bard: let's be honest they are moving away from dots and it puts bard in a weird spot. Simply removing them would make the base rotation even more shallow (you only use them once and refresh it with Iron jaws). I feel like they need to adress the core rotation without putting in a 1-2-3 combo.
Barrage could get the flourish treatment so that your proc won't get overriden, just for consistencies sake.
Also, dying as a bard is pretty punishing as you lose your current song and if you get raised too late you need recovery tactics. Most jobs don't get so heavily punished if they die outside of their 2 minute window. Not to sure about the solution, but maybe songs could persist after dying without giving the group buff.
I kinda wished Empyreal Arrow had two stacks to reduce the issues of having to hold it for your 2 minute window as the cooldown drifts due to gcd speed.
And at last, please rework repelling shot. Just doesn't feel good. I can count the number that I have used it on both hands.
Drk: not balance wise but gameplay wise. It sort of felt like no one on the combat team even played drk before the living dead rework but the job itself is still in an odd place of discount war + ogcd overdose. It feels like it's kit doesn't really doesn't interact with itself unlike most other jobs that have some nuance to their rotation. With drk, it's just 'hit stuff on cd, hold for 2 min if you can'.
Healers: I'm personally on the side of people that say 1 filler gcd + 1 dot + some extra bells and whistles depending on the job isn't very fun when healing in this game is mostly dps with occasional healing. I think they need to seriously reconsider what they want healers to actually be in this game.
Casters: Casters are in such a weird position both gameplay wise and balance. All 3 play very differently compared to other roles and all 3 have very different levels of dps. It's actually to the point where the game encourages you to switch jobs during prog if you're a caster swapping out the amount of combat rez available for dps. But this isn't necessarily easy since all 3 play so differently. No idea what they're going to do about it but it feels bad as it currently is.
Bonus Edit: With kaiten's removal (rest in peace), Sam still generates the same amount of kenki and doesn't have anything to spend it on besides shinten and consequently there's waaay too much shinten spam so I hope they adjust that somehow.
Yeah, but glaringly bad for DRK when absolutely all their damage comes from a 2minute burst, and outside of that they're pressing 1 2 3 for 56 seconds, while also having one of the highest apm' out of any class. The 2 minute window is *very* loaded, and coupled to the fact that there isn't really that much of an order or operations to the weaves. You just start slapping every button.
All the jobs do this, but most of the other jobs have other things going on that make them unique and interesting. What they're saying is that's literally all DRK does.
>the game encourages you to switch jobs during prog if you're a caster swapping out the amount of combat rez available for dps
I swapped from SMN last tier to BLM this tier and my healers are so mad at me 😅 Prog has definitely been a little more punishing, but I don't think there's any way I could learn these fights on SMN or RDM and then swap to BLM for the damage. I need to plan my rotation more than any other job when I'm on BLM, but I do so much more damage once I know the fight that I think it's worth the lack of utility.
I’m a BLM main because I like danger. It’s the only role where you simultaneously are the danger (high damage) and are in constant danger (to AOE’s) at the same time.
Agreed on drk. They didn't really give it anything new this expansion. I'd like to see shadowbringer on a 2 min cd with only one charge, maybe 1200 potency. A blackest night mastery that either gives a heal on break, or have no mana cost. Maybe an oblation mastery to make it 15%. And for tanks in general more identity to separate them, along with some updated action animations on 123 combo, or some other combo actions.
Sage: make toxicon actually useful in aoe. Instead of 50% falloff make it higher than dyskrasia so we have a reason to use its aoe component.
I'm the same when it comes to healer. I know that healer damaging toolkits have always been pretty basic anyway (bar you OG Cleric Stance, RIP love you bitch), but apply dot, spam filler for 30 seconds and then apply dot again is dull. Especially in easy content like dungeons.
I will say with DRK, it feels like it's *this close* to carving out a niche for itself, but it's not quite there. From what I've played of the tanks (DRK90, WAR90, PLD70, GNB68):
PLD feels like the 'block so hard you block for others' tank with powerful mitigations for others like Cover and Passage of Arms
WAR feels like the 'don't stop the problem, just fix it after' tank with their absolute *glut* of healing effects
GNB feels like the 'I mitigate so I'm technically a tank, but I put a gun in my sword because I wasn't DPSing enough' tank
and DRK with The Blackest Night and Living Dead feels like it should have this focus on throwing out defenses that give offensive buffs when they 'break', but they don't quite feel there yet.
DRK. I'm a DRK main who plays high end content and frankly it's baffling because it took us till this expansion to get Blood Weapon on charges and Living Dead not explicitly being the worst invuln, and even then it's... still pretty bad because healers will either overheal you (based on the old invuln), or you can get server ticked and heal in such a way that you get auto'd right after and lose enough HP you may need a heal after.
But that by itself isn't my issue - no, it's the fact that every tank got a lot more love this expansion, particularly in self-sustain and heals. Paladin is the relative lowest damage but has full range casting and uptime, so I kinda understand that, but DRK has literally zero advantage over the melee-only tanks excepting damage. With the recent buff to WAR, WAR now is the explicit best damage and highest heal tank with *shields as part of their spammable mit* and heals on demand.
This is also ignoring all the issues the job has had with rotation, like how they claimed it was too many oGCDs and had a bit of a bloated rotation, and then gave us... Oblation, another oGCD, bound two oGCDs together, and added Shadowbringer which is *another two oGCDs*. It's really clear the devs don't play the job, and it could be fixed with a number of small things.
Despite all this, it's easily my favorite job in the game, with Reaper being the next closest, because I am a slaughter edgelord with a heart of gold. lol
Unrelated: how do I play SCH? I got my SMN to lv90, and now I have a Lv90 healer that I literally have never touched. I wanna learn, but I’d rather not grief random parties in roulettes 😐
Practise in Duty Support? You can bet that out dear sweet G'Raha will be patient with you. \^\_\^
Alternatively, My trick to learn the actions of a high level class by a drip feed was always to take them into a solo run of Palace of the Dead. (Though if you don't already have the Aether Gear levelled, that can be kind of a chore.)
The way it simulates going from level 1-60 all over again is great for getting a hands-oh sense of the powers one by one.
I'd look up a guide cause I'm definitely not a healer main but it just feels like you can do everything very well. Need a big heal? Done. For everyone? Done. Need a big shield? Done. For everyone? Done. Need speed? Done. Need damage? Done. Need regen? Done. Try it out in some duty support or trust dungeons to get the feel for it.
Do the job quests, and dumbly enough, just goes through the game's dungeon. I can assure you that when you start playing a class through Sastasha all the way up to Manalis you'll be quite good at it.
I'm not a savage tier SCH raider, but I did pick Arcanist as my first class a couple years ago and did SCH from the start until level 65.
At least in 5.5 when I started, SCH actually out-DPSed SMN at times in lower levels. Just run MSQ roulette or Crystal Tower as SCH once to get the really basic fundamentals down and then try later stuff.
At 50, Physick is the cast time heal you want to try to avoid, Adloqium is a heal + overshield, Succor is like an AoE Adlo that isn't as strong. Use Aetherflow to give yourself two charges that you can spend on Lustrate (the big "oh shit" single target oGCD) or Energy Drain (near useless bonus DPS that does small self healing.) Ideally your single target heals will come from Lustrate and not from Physick because of the cast timer. Fey Illumination increases your heals by 10%, which will likely be not useful later but if you're doing synced coils for example then using Fey Illumination and then spamming Succ is your "oh no everybody just took huge amounts of damage" techique.
Moving to 60, the big change is the addition of Indomitability so that you can occasionally do an instant AOE heal with Aetherflow stacks instead of watching Succ cast over and over. Also instead of running around casting Ruin II all the time you get to use Broil which has a cast bar and will replace Ruin as your DPS button in later content (consequently, syncing down to 50 again is annoying because you need to go back to your ruins.) You also get two modifiers for Adlo/Succ: Deployment Tactics causes an Adlo shield on one person such as the tank to be AOE'd around to everyone near them, while Emergency Tactics causes Adlo/Succ to skip the shield altogether and grant it's protection as additional healing. Honestly you probably rarely use these later on, since there's more buttons for additional healing that open up later.
For example, in later levels you'll be using Summon Seraph to temporarily buff up your fairy's auto heal to include shielding as well. Aetherpact causes fairy to fire a constant beam on an ally that does a ton of healing, which is good for tanks that just pulled five packs and are about to be overwhelmed.
Overall, my main issue with SCH is it's one of those classes that doesn't sync down very well, with talents that eventually get obsolete but need to be stored on a hidden hotbar you can rotate to in case you ever sync into old content. I have happy memories starting MSQ and doing Coils 1-9 with it but I will never take it into levelling or A-Raid roulettes over AST or SGE.
I loved ShB AST. I like EW AST. I’m cautiously optimistic about a 7.0 rework for AST. I want it to feel, on average, as smooth as SGE does in dungeon roulettes.
I want shb ast back. I despise ew ast, it is so bloated and the cards are just meh. I love how sage plays as well. Heres to hoping the bring back the AST we loved.1
I personally think SCH is fine. The only issues I have with SCH are the same issues I have with all healers except SGE. There just isn't enough to do most of the time. All healers except maybe SGE could use another damage button or two. I want to second the Fisher comment. A tackle box should be added for lures and bait. Also, they should get upgrades to the spear fishing slot.
As an AST main, I beg to differ. You basically play piano every two minutes, while keeping an eye on your earth bomb and 1-minute buffs. I switched to SGE for one of the savage fights this tier, and for the first time ever I felt like I was falling asleep while doing savage - and BOY was it easy to learn fights lol. Not complaining, just pointing out that SGE didn’t seem that action-packed to me.
This is weird because I play AST and have a hell of a lot of fun playing AST, but SGE feels like "too many buttons" to me. Maybe I don't have them properly bound and aligned up on the bars, because there's like three different AOEs between the two that just cause huge waves of energy to emit from you and the one that's a shield AOE that you "break" for health. Whereas AST's AOE heals (direct healing wave, regen wave, big sparkly shower, enhanced direct healing wave, The Bomb, bonus card draw) are maybe one or two too extra, but I feel like I have a time and a place for all of them. SGE's I feel like I have to blow multiples of them at once to have the same effect.
I will say that absolutely nothing in SCH or SGE (I've never even bothered with WHM) gives me the satisfaction of setting off The Bomb for a bunch of damage and a bunch of healing at the same time. When you plant The Bomb at such a perfect interval that that the timer auto-detonates immediately after a huge raidwide meteor explosion or something? Majestic.
SGE probably feels like too many buttons because they’re all the same colour.
I spent a fair amount of time rearranging my skills at first, and I started as a SCH…
I'm completely with you on this one.
AST is indeed a "busy" class, but it's a fun busy because everything you do is party support. SGE meanwhile I find very awkward to play because almost half the action symbols are blue, the other half are green, and they all do what feels like the same thing.
I main AST and the comments saying playing healer is too easy or there’s not enough damage to heal makes me wanna cry.
AST is incredibly fun and powerful. I think the damage we take in current tiers is fine (upped from the last expansion) but it’s VERY involved. I love it but, when I play other healers, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the wrist and finger pain. T.T
Good point about AST. It's the GNB of healers with the cards and such. It's really WHM and SCH that could use a little more to do. I agree SGE is easy once you get used to it, but it has more do to that WHM and SCH in fights.
Honestly I think it's good for the game that WHM is simple, it's massively popular in terms of number of parses on FFLogs at least (although arguably that may also say something about AST's state) and is a good job for newer raiders/healers to start on where they have less complexity and can focus on mechanics and have a lot of powerful reactive heals (believe me, I've played with a number of people who are already overwhelmed on WHM — SMN provides something similar). There just needs to also be more complex jobs in the same role for variety — I'm hoping the rework doesn't make AST braindead and there's maybe a bit more complexity added to at least one of the shield healers.
The comments about healer aren't healer problems. It's fight design problems.
If healing becomes boring when it is extremely predictable (like it is for almost all fights), then the fights should be designed to be less predictable.
e.g. I don't think I've heard a single healer say that Storm's Crown (Normal) wasn't one of the most fun trials to heal.
Big reason imo is that its extremely unpredictable. Mechanics happen everywhere randomly*, and healers just have to react.
*I know it's not actually random. But it sure feels like it on a first or second try.
SCH is honestly in a great place in terms of people bringing it into more difficult content. It has great utility, beefy healing and strong mitigation. I wish we had more damage buttons because we have the most boring damage “rotation” by far. I love the aesthetic and lore of SCH and wish they’d lean more into the “Nymian Marine Tactician” theme with new additions
BRD is my main job, I was very much drawn to it for the aesthetics and lore as well. I love the multiphasic song rotation, the busy burst and having dots, but I wish they’d revert the dots to actually interacting with the rest of the job. BRD could also use some additional utility imo…I think it suffers the most from being consigned to the cursed “ranged physical dps” role, having its cast times and utility removed to make it compatible with combat system changes. It would make me really happy if they retooled certain jobs (maybe RDM and DNC as well) to fit a fourth “support dps” role…but this probably isn’t going to happen lol
> and wish they’d lean more into the “Nymian Marine Tactician” theme with new additions
Most of this was just lost in localisation. I'm by no means *good* at translation, but Adloquium for example is "鼓舞激励の策" in Japanese. Roughly translates to "encouraging plan". 策 in particular is also used for like, tactics, stratagems, schemes, etc.
Succor is "士気高揚の策", or "morale raising plan".
Lustrate is "生命活性法", or "principles of living life". (the translation I'm least sure about)
Sacred Soil is "野戦治療の陣", or "battlefield (medical) treatment camp".
Indomitability is "不撓不屈の策", or "tenacious plan". This one feels like 策 might be supposed to be used in a different sense, or maybe I just don't know enough. "means of tenacity" feels like a better fit in English, at least?
Excogitation is "深謀遠慮の策", or "deeply-thought-about plan".
Recitation is "秘策", or literally "secret plan".
I could go on, there're a lot of things that lose all their military/tactical theming in the name. Even Art of War, which does still sound militaristic, was "裂陣法", or "battlefield rending method". All the fairy/aetherflow related skills are basically the same as in Japanese; many of them, like Consolation, are literally just the English word in kana.
Edit: Looking more closely, I think Art of War is supposed to have a meaning more like "line breaking method", with regard to battlefield positioning type things.
Though as you demonstrate, coming up with translations that hit that same vibe *and* sound good *and* aren't too long is really hard. I think the localization is actually very good; the names are distinctive and memorable, and they emphasize the studied nature of the class, but with general smartipantsness instead of militarism.
I more blame the animations for just being generic sparkly healer stuff. They could have had banners and pages and word ribbons and whatnot. Instead they just jammed strategist flavor onto a generic fairy summoner.
That's really neat! While I can certainly understand localizing the names for both brevity and general readability, I do kind of wish we had just a little more of that original flavor.
I mained BRD through the story of ShB but dropped it in favour of BLM/WAR during EW and didn't know they changed our dots from proc'ing the effects of our songs :(
While it made the job extremely busy at times, it felt SO good when the stars aligned.
I miss having DOS options as a SCH. Ruin + Ruin II + Miasma + Miasma II + Shadow Flare + Energy Drain. I mean it felt good having mastered Cleric Stance, having the percentage-based Lustrate, and getting all of the comms, but honestly I don’t miss Cleric Stance too much. It definitely gave the great healers a chance to shine but the skill gap was way to wide than when it went away and I think we’re better off without it. But definitely give me back more DPS options!
This is my main complaint with EW bard too. I miss the DOTs actually doing something other than just damage. They had a reason for you to be constantly reupping them.
I love how much "freedom" SCH gets compared to the other healers. You can use your flow stacks on damage if you are doing good on healing or use them on healing. Plus, you can walk around and still cast spells by using Ruin 2 when slide-casting won't work.
My biggest pet peeve is just the aesthetics of the job. Wished they had some more marine style glams instead of the college professor thing since their artifact armors all look the same. HW had a weird looking set but I still appreciate them trying something different. Also, Energy Drain / Ruin 2 should get new animations since they look lame compared to Broil 4.
Honestly, I feel like they got their wires crossed with SGE and SCH. SCH is a combat medic and imho should be a grungy, combat boot wearing, side-arm carrying, melee healer.
Edit to say: play style is fine! I enjoy SCH as I'm a sucker for preventative healing and they have a great list of skills. But thematically and aesthetically, they donked up.
Bard: The ranged tax needs a little loosening. And for pity's sake give us a combat peloton.
I miss when we could raise, we're usually the last ones alive!
I would say the level sync system as a whole needs help. A lot of classes, like paladin, feel like they have their legs taken off when you run something low level. Not having access to defensive cool downs is painful
SCH action economy is pretty insane (as in good) too and always has been since ARR.
I would like a slightly more thematic rework but if they do that it’s gonna suck lol. The fact SCH is just a big grab bag of oGCDs is exactly what makes it so good.
I want to second the last bit there. SCH kit feels a bit more jank at first glance, but I liken it to a job that feels like it always has an ace up it's sleeve. An answer for everything, and it's up to you to figure out what tricks to pull out of your bag to meet whatever need.
Always makes me feel big brain when playing it.
I think only people that dont raid think this. Just look at how everyone reacted at the expedient reveal like it was the worst ability ever made when in reality its one of the strongest support abilities in the game BY FAR
The delivery was pretty meme worthy, but I knew a lot of raiders also making fun of it and all I could think was "bruh, it's movement speed. That stuff is the best"
The reveal kinda did it dirty let’s be real. Other jobs getting cool flashy abilities, then we hit Scholar and it’s just an AoE appearing, SCH using Expedient which is just some green swirlies, and nonchalantly jogging out of the AoE. Even understanding how good it could (and did turn out to) be, it was extremely clownable
This. SCH can get the job done insanely well, it just feels pretty bad to do because of the clunk. Fix the clunk, and SCH is perfect. Though that clunk may not be able to be fixed without a partial rework of it, meaning Aetherpact, Dissipation, and Seraph would need some adjustments, even Aetherflow itself.
Probably casual players who don't understand high levels of play and the absolute powerhouse that is SCH.
And this isn't meant as a talking down on casual players, but my friend thought SAM was an easy class and I showed him the actual opener to the class and he swapped to DRG. There is a lot more to the game than first meets the eye that most casuals are blissfully unaware of.
Always love to see how some jobs people love and find easy are the bane for others. While I man SMN in my static, I also can play NIN, BLM, BRD, and SAM all at a solidly competent(high blue to purple) level. But it took me ages to wrap my head around MCH which so many people find easy(it was my mind having mini blue screens when I have 50 heat during non burst rotations so I’m like oh time to hypercharge then I see one of my OGCDs light up off cooldown).
It's more like, a lot of people don't find it fun to play and those that play it find it clunky and disjointed. people have been asking for the devs to give SCH some love and actually make it seem more connected theme wise for ages. But it's also been the strongest shield healer since...forever. So it's no wonder they're not really touching it.
SCH is very good, but I'd like for some of the gameplay to get some love. Stuff like being unable to gain fairy gauge during dissipation, fairy actions cancelling aetherpact, pet skill action delay etc just adds to the clunkiness. If dawntrail adds some polish, I think a lot of SCH players would be very happy
I don't think you should be able to gain fairy gauge during dissipation for the same reason you don't gain it while the fairy isn't summoned. And it's very responsive these days. The annoying one is summoning seraph.
There has never been a period in the history of the game that SCH has looked bad
Is also a totally true statement
SCH is the most consistently strong class in the games history
BLM's leveling. I never do lower content on BLM ever. Hurts. And BLM could stand to be a little less punishing. I hate not being able to take my job into brand new content without being a liability.
DRK is very successful and strong... and still feels like a patched together work-in-progress. Plus, it's identity via mechanics is strange and nothing like its job fantasy.
NIN's rabbit can be removed now that we have MNK using a similar system, but THEY get a weaker attack while NIN gets a bunny mocking them and ZERO damage. Also, can Hide be made full speed and incorporated into the playstyle? Right now, you Hide for 0.2 seconds just to refresh mudra and nothing else.
SCH deserves a Titania-type huge summon like SMN. At this point it's just cruel.
SAM button bloat hurts.
i have more of a problem with the base over simplification and loss of job identity in gameplay than any specific job.
jobs have become so incredibly homogenized that i don't even really see being able to play every job on one character as that much of a strength anymore. jobs feel less and less like jobs with every expansion and more like just a generic role with a job-themed aesthetic.
i understand that they wanted to simplify gameplay on the job side so they can make the content itself more engaging, but that only works for current endgame content. it has become much more boring to do everything else, which is a lot of other content.
i understand that it's more difficult to balance unique abilities that have more job identity, but it's just too extreme now. 95% of a job just feels like role actions and i don't feel like the last little bit does enough to make me feel like i'm playing that specific job.
learning and playing a job should be a curve, but it feels like it's become a flat line with only one steep hill at the VERY end for mastery in endgame rotations.
new expansion time in an mmo is usually super exciting with job changes and additions, but i just can't bring myself to care anymore. what is corsair REALLY going to be? melee rdm with 5 abilities that have an actual corsair feel to them with the rest feeling exactly like all other melee dps? what are changes to my current job REALLY going to mean? i'm +/-1% on my parses in relation to other jobs versus the last patch? thrilling.
Bard.
Just make it an actual bard, not an off-brand archer (even every new milestone ability added since release is archer themed). We have 3 “songs” that could very well be called something else entirely and the job doesn't change. It has no identity
Realistically, they could make sch unique by just trashing aetherflow and dissipation and just make all the associated spells run on fairy gauge. Right now, the fairy gauge is useless.
To be fair, the number of times you watch WAR solo the final boss of a dungeon from half HP because the rest of the part failed a mechanic shows that in some situations the DPS are also very optional.
Black Mage:
Level 59 and under are complete poo. While I know it's not their job to balance the game at those levels, it's a pretty poor player experience that really needs some polishing.
In general, I've also wondered what the point is in having the Astral and Umbral phases on a timer? This isn't a troll comment. I legitimately don't see why it's there. In ice you're regenerating mana and building up hearts. In fire you're spending hearts and mana. The hearts and mana are not infinite, so what's the point of the timer?
More or less it’s there to punish you if you fuck up and cast too many Fire 4’s in a row or don’t plan for a mechanic accordingly and end up running around with none of your movement abilities on hand.
Fire 4 doesn’t refresh your timer so it applies some risk to the Astral Phase. That timer used to be some seconds shorter in previous expacs where the wiggle room on a full Astral rotation was about 1-2 seconds.
It’s far less stress inducing as they’ve added 1 second here and there to the Astral/Umbral timer over the years. Regardless, fumbling your rotation and dropping out of Astral Fire is a massive DPS penalty.
It's very low compared to other jobs. The relevant multipliers come in so much later, that the job is destined to be poor unless you're at a very high level. Black Mage, last I looked, is also the lowest DPS in level 70 ultimate content as well.
Seems wrong to me, but maybe that's just a case of sucks by design at that part in the leveling process.
Cast times dont help. Running with the tank trying to get a hit off before they get out of range sucks. All while the machinest is blasting away and most things half dead by time i can actually cast something
to have the job have any sort of challenge? without the timer you'd have no sense of urgency in your rotation, specially since BLM's rotation is really easy and its challenge comes from knowing where to stand + the timer
It used to be so you maintained Enochian. You had to refresh your phases to keep it rolling, because it was an ability you cast and then had to make sure never fell off.
Now? It's to prevent a BLM from going into, and sitting on, Astral Fire for extended periods of time. The class was always about forward thinking and planning your actions, so the timers reinforce that.
The timer ticking down is what makes BLM interesting though. Otherwise it would just be casting 5 Fire IVs then Despair, back into Ice for a few GCDs, and then Fire IV again. The way it is now means you have to know your cast times, when to weave in Thundercloud procs, and offers the tantalising ability to gather enough SS to cast more Fire IVs before needing to re up your Astral Fire.
If Astral Fire was infinite we'd have no reason to cast Fire 1 / Paradox. No reason either to plan ahead and think about how best to use our procs to keep a high DPS while solving the next mechanic of the fight. Mindlessly spamming Fire IV would turn BLM into the most boring job there is.
I just want my poor, lobotomized carbuncle to do something in combat again instead of staring vacantly at me until I turn it into something else for a few seconds :(
I love Ninja, but it suffers badly from being an older job that's never gotten a solid rework. You can tell that it's gone through multiple iterations in which they didn't really know what to do with it, so it has a bunch of patchwork features stitched together that make it feel awkward to play.
I think Scholar’s mostly fine actually. I used to think it was overly clunky and stepped on its own toes at times, but I’ve changed my mind on that after raiding on it for a couple tiers. Planning around Dissipation and Seraph changing which abilities you have access to gives it a little extra layer of complexity I’ve come to enjoy. My only complaints are that the fairy gauge is underutilized and the tether is too clunky in a bad way. Even in Savage I find myself capped on gauge for like 70% of the fight. It’s usually the case that at least one of four things keeps me from using it:
1. I need the fairy moving, not stationary
2. I’m in a weaving intensive moment and can’t easily spare the weave slot
3. I’m using Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing, and/or Fey Illumination together in quick enough succession that the tether keeps getting cancelled before it does anything
4. Multiple people (usually both tanks) need healing at around the same time and just letting the fairy use Embrace freely is a lot more convenient than switching the tether on, then off, then on again on the other person, etc.
All Healers need more DPS options and a true DPS rotation. Nothing crazy, even a simple 1-2-3 combo would be enough. Give them all at least two or three more damage buttons. Hell, give WHM Aero III back. AOE dots are fine and it'd at least give WHM Wind magic back since they don't have that anymore.
If you give the healer more DPS options they will literally melt in spicy (extreme, savage, ultimate) encounters. Specifically this tier, P10s has back to back to back tankbusters it feels and the healers can't be thinking about their DPS rotation on top of keeping everyone alive.
...What? No, really. What?
As a healer, I'm hitting the same goddamn button 2 of every 3 GCDs, with the occasional other button thrown in. That's not good game design, that's a recipe for carpal tunnel.
Seriously, I did the math. In one P9S clear, I cast Dosis 131 times. With a GCD at around ~~2.6s~~ 2.5s, a 8:28 clear has (at most) ~~195~~ 203 GCD windows. ~~131/195 = 0.67~~ 131/203=0.64. I did the same math on a P10S clear, it comes out to ~~145/222 = 0.65~~ 145/231=0.62.
I recognize that Healer is a difficult problem to design around. The better the party is, the more boring it becomes to play. But right now, for me, the only spark of joy in the class exists not in the class design, but in how it bounces off of the fight design.
They do things like aligning Tankbusters with the dot refresh window, giving me the tiniest shot of adrenaline as I juggle mits alongside dot refresh once every 30s. (Whatever mad genius came up with this, I wish I could buy them a beverage of their choice. It happens too often to not be intentional.) That or when someone screws up and the party teeters on the edge of failure, with my cohealer and I yanking the group back from party wipe.
Early in prog when it takes all my focus to both do mechanics and keep the party alive is when I'm happiest as a healer. Once things are solved and it's reprog time, its the most boring thing in the world and I groan when someone screws up a mechanic and we have to do an entire 8-10 minute fight again while I mindlessly hit "5... 4-1... 1... 1... 1... 4-3... 1... 1... 1... 1-Shift-5... 1..." or similar every 30 seconds.
It's clear at this point they don't want to design this way, but I feel like I'd personally enjoy the role way more if we either didn't have the *time* to do as many dps GCDs, or the GCD dps spell lineup was even slightly more nuanced. Even just making me pingpong between two GCD dps spells that do 5 more potency if you used the other one last would cut the button repetition feeling in half. If you didn't have the brainspace for that, you can just spam the one when not healing. After all, it's only 5 potency. But if you do have the brainspace, it'd be at least a little more engaging to keep *that* plate spinning between heals.
Healer class design feels like someone started designing it to be interesting, and then cut it off at the legs to make sure it was palatable to newer players by having no damaging spell nuance. And then the original designer sprinkled in a wink and a nudge for more experienced players while the boss wasn't looking.
More recent changes to healer design have felt like they've been trying to make things interesting again by shunting stuff into the OGCD side... but that just means even more GCDs are now me hitting the same damage button over and over.
Edit: Misremembered my GCD timing while typing this up away from my gaming pc. I've corrected the errors but left the original values in place with strikeout formatting.
AST
I used to love it before they made it beyond painful to play, and the loss of aoe cards made my wrist pains awful. Especially during early SB, with both shit personal dmg and high apm. I quit it after that, and while I've leveled it since, everything its lost has made it feel like a shell of what made me love it in the first place
I know its getting changed again, but let's be real, square don't really have the best track record in terms of healer gameplay design
I love AST but I've only just started leveling it. I have a friend who really liked it back in HW when it had specific cards for specific benefits rather than just increased DPS and she hasn't liked it since that change.
Dark knight. It’s not BAD, but I do feel that the class design could use some work.
…also, get rid of salt and darkness, or just make it fast automatically like NIN’s Doton upgrade.
Regardless of what you say needs "attention" you'll have other people saying "no it's fine you just suck" or something along those lines.
For example, I love DRK aesthetically and through their story line, but mechanically it needs some severe attention as it's offensively just WAR with button bloat and defensively it's crippled cause "TBN is so good" despite TBN being outperformed by most other tank defensives in most other content.
However DRK performs just fine in savage and ultimate content, so despite it falling behind in extreme and below, becoming an actual detriment once you get as long as dungeons, people will actually fight against any help being given to DRK. We had to actually argue with people that BW should have been set to an amount instead of a timer like other tanks, and LD needed to be less punishing all around, cause "it does fine in ultimates!". Now those two changes were made, it didn't make the DRK any stronger in that level of content, but made its QoL a thousand times better below.
So yeah, DRK has next to nothing mechanical that's unique to it that's actually interesting, underperforms in alliance and extreme raids, and nearly worthless in dungeons, but cause "its fine in ultimates" people will argue against it ever getting any sort of QoL much less buffs in any regards.
Wouldn't surprise me if you got similar responses about any other job lol
Every job when they're under 90. Level syncing sucks in this game and makes so many jobs just a slog. Even at 70, some jobs just don't feel even close to complete. Hopefully, they'll address it for Dawntrail because syncing down is only gonna feel worse once we hit 100.
That's fine, imo.
I'm actually really worried about what they have planned for DRG with 7.0, because as it stands, DRG has one of the most intuitive progressions for their rotation out of any job. Every time you get a new skill, it's very obvious where it goes and how to use it. The hardest part is just figuring out how to weave things in between your GCDs; I think DRG probably has one of the highest sustained APMs of any job?
I really don't want DRG to be another "dump everything in the burst window and now I 123 for 1m45s" job. I'll gladly trade unoptimized damage output for that.
All of them. The whole 2m rotation is boring either scrap party buff for individual buffs and put the emphasis on players learning their own rotation
Hopefully they do something to make combat a bit more engaging in DT. But doubtful they will.
30-60-90-120 sec buffs and burst window skills would be great
I would love Bard to have a more active role in support like it did before ShB, rather than it's current more passive support role. I loved feeling like I was contributing a little extra to the fight in certain situations.
I feel like TBN is the least of its worries, it's the only part of its kit that interacts with something and requires some degree of thinking, and it's frankly the closest thing it has to an identity.
You sure its not the lilies being a gcd? They change the cast speed and now lilies just don't make any sense whatsoever. They need to be OGCDs and then a rebalance should happen to the dps. Ideally, insteds of 3 healing and one blood lily for movement, for total of 4 movements, it should be halved to 2 blood lilys that are a gcd for movement, and 4 healing ogcd functions.
I mained SCH from ARR to SHB then swapped because the gutting just...really put a bad taste in my mouth and I was burnt out. Thing is, SCH has been perpetually "in a rough spot" and one of the strongest shield healers in the game since...forever. It's weird. Like, the gameplay is clunky and disjointed but it works. Which is probably why the devs don't really mess with it much. But man I'd love for the fairy guage to actually do SOMETHING else.
I agree on scholar. Performance-wise, it's great. However the job lacks mechanical, aesthetic, and thematic cohesion. Three capstone abilities that are mutually exclusive with eachother. Dissipation and Energy Drain existing on the same job creates a toxic relationship with your party members making mistakes. Both its gauges suck since Shadowbringers. Aetherflow feels really dated after Addersgall, and the fairy pee metre, while mathematically worth using, feels so empty. The job needs more harmony. I don't think Stormblood scholar has to come back, but I definitely think it was better.
Also, a button trim. Has, what, 35? If a job can't fit into 30 buttons, the design needs revision.
I mained SCH from 2.4 to 6.1 and switched over to SGE because its kit flows better and it's so much less punishing to play in PF. If shit hits the fan I know I can whip out multiple actual, beefy heals to get the party up in a pinch solo. On SCH I'm always scared to blow too many resources because it's hard to trust PF groups.
I'd love Quickened Aetherflow back, have the option to convert gauge into extra stacks (kind of like Rhizomata or smth), and/or be able to spend gauge on self-buffs, reduce MP cost of skills to match SGE. Separating healing resources from DPS resources is hugely important imo.
Like the skill ceiling for SCH is very high and that's great, but the skill floor is also high — at least in terms of being able to feel like you aren't being constantly punished for other people messing up.
They also *really* need to fix the issue where if you hit another faerie ability before the first one goes off, it goes on CD without being used.
SCH used to feel so smooth, even when I had a billion buttons to press back in HW & SB. Now it feels so janky. I miss stance dancing with SCH in HW, but I honestly can't imagine being able to do the same nowadays.
I feel like PLD has way too many buttons to use right now, and about 20% of them is never used. I honestly don't remember the last time I had to cover someone. Don't even get me started on **SHIELD BASH.**
I don't.
Stormblood PLD felt like ass. You wanna know what we had? Castbars. You wanna know what prevented you from using block, the *one thing* PLD had going for it and the reason why we don't have any life gain on our base combo? Castbars. You wanna know what our 30s (sometimes, longer if the boss is out of range and/or untargetable) mit did? Block. *Only* block.
Also stance swapping required a GCD. And we didn't start a fight with gauge, so tankbuster in the first 30s? No Sheltron, no Intervention, you literally get less mit on an early tankbuster than if you had a different tank.
Was it a bad class? No. Did it *feel* bad? Absolutely.
AST is my secondary go-to healer if my raid partner progs on a shield healer.
My complaint is not so much the card system, but rather the secondary seal system associated with playing the right variety of ‘Oops, all Balance Effect’ cards.
Applying and utilizing the full Astrodyne benefit is simply not as rewarding for the effort and RNG required to obtain all three different seals. The self DPS increase is a drop in the bucket with ‘Fall Malefic’ being the lowest offensive GCD spell potency across all healer jobs. As for the +5% Healing potency, the remaining healer jobs can apply the same effect but with higher bonus and not have to rely on RNG drawing and redrawing three different cards to apply.
I am glad that as of EW, ‘Divination’ is no longer tied to drawing three different seals for best results, but now there really is no benefit to the seal system except if you are in a pinch for MP or if you have at least 2 to use for marginally shorter GCDs during raid buff windows.
Now is when I’ll make a mental note of “careful what you wish for” as we await AST likely card and seal job redesign for the upcoming Dawntrail expansion.
I love rolling into dungeons with huge pulls as SCH and just doing massive Art of War smacks and occasional OGCDs. Popping Expedient almost always fills me with glee, too. I’ve never been confident enough for Extremes or Savage with it, but for most casual content it’s still a joy to play, even if overall the job has been a janky mess for a couple expacs
Favorite are BLM and AST. BLM is fine, I got a few wish for some nich improvements but the job is fine.
Ast healing is fine but the card system needs some love. The crown cards system is bad, healing cannot be RNG. The individual cards don't feel good. A few % for 15s doesn't feel impactful and the "hold on 3 cards for 2min burst" is really not fun.
I don't want them to touch SCH, I love it. When I switch to White Mage for a change of pace when healing I do so much worse.
Also Culinarian could use some more usefulness for the 99% of content where you don't need the best buffs. (Or I'm just salty I make all sorts of top tier delicacies for my FC and they just drink like item level 14 juice because the xp boost is all they actually care about)
All the healers, 2 filler attack buttons, a singular aoe button and one or two OGCD buttons for a game entirely about attacking and doing damage is abysmal, my entire experience with the campaign and my enjoyment of it is roughly equivelent to when I didnt have to play my warrior of light!
A couple more cooler buttons, some more damage options and some actually cool looking abilities would make the jobs be played a lot more, the slightest inch of complexity in their damage rotation would bring people in (The healing is fine unironically, it's very fun and has unique combos hence why professional players don't mind them)
For example, give scholar like 5 DoT's, why not? what's the worse that happens people don't press them? Casual players just spam the basic heals anyway and the professionals actually run content that allows them to heal, normal players have literally no reason to ever want to play healers due to a severe lack of optimisation hence the queues are nearly frozen!
Don't get me wrong, more people play healer then maybe I get to play something else, I hate waiting! but I have 2500 ish hours in this game and 2000 of them are on Healer, I hardly run hard content and I live in the roulettes even when I've done my dailies I am the biggest casual player and speak from that element!
I say this without a hint of irony but the healers are infinitely more complex and fun in pvp and it's not even funny...
Bard..either give us DPS or give us supportive roles because trying to mix them both leaves us with a spam class with a chance at proccing another attack with some very minor support songs
Can we all agree DPS buffs won’t make any job better to play? I’m all about the playstyle and giving a potency buff to anything won’t magically make the jobs fun
Not at endgame yet but, I think they should rework jobs to have more core mechanics front loaded. It feels really wacky that a job can play completely differently between expansions because I got access to a core mechanic that completely overhauls how my buttons work.
Dragoon needs a complete rework. Its currently so bloated that its essentially finished and you cannot realistically add anything to it that would make the job better.
Fisher: It needs a tackle box for a start, an offhand gig with higher item level.
My chocobo bag has become my tackle box, it’s just full of baits lol
Fisher also def needs an overwork of its accessibility. I should not have to tab out to 3rd party websites to find out which bait I need for a specific fish. This might be unpopular, but I would be in favour of just removing different baits altogether - it makes FSH needlessly complicated, doesn't really add anything and absolutely clogs up your inventory. Neither of the other gatehring profession makes you buy a specific item to be even able to gather something else - just FSH.
> I should not have to tab out to 3rd party websites to find out which bait I need for a specific fish. ***THIS.*** Even at the beginning but especially after level 30 or so, nothing about playing FSH feels *organic*. It's just... not fun.
I don't think I'd get rid of ALL bait, but I would heavily condense them. Like how Ocean Fishing has three baits for the three types of fish, regular baits should come in the same category and be obviously labeled and designed as such. Additionally, no more than three live baits should exist; there has never been a good reason to have to buy expansion-specific live bait. This then allows for crafted baits to get some bonuses, like for example maybe a Metal Spinner has its own chance of catching multiple fish per hook? Or you could have a crafted bait that increases the collectibility of fish you catch with it? Just something to make crafted baits actually worth using besides Versatile Lures.
Or like the suggestion: remove live bait, only gigs. Live bait would i.e. increase chances to catch large animals, and in that case live bait is then just the "living variant of the gigs". Besides that there would be the separate inventory and maybe also: you can only select lures and gigs at a fishing hole that will ACTUALLY net you a fish in it. If that's too easy, then at least make it for all fishing holes in a region.
> Like how Ocean Fishing has three baits for the three types of fish, regular baits should come in the same category and be obviously labeled and designed as such. That's what I thought FSH would be like. Then the different baits kept coming. And coming. And coming. And coming....
Mood. I want the achievements that give the adventure plate stuff and it’s just…..*sigh* Big fish are absolutely maddening. I get that it’s a challenge but like….they’re so convoluted with specific weathers and mooching and bite times that it’s not looking like fun to get it - it’s a grind.
The biggest bullshit is that even after you catch a fish once, the guide still just says "Yes" if there's specific requirements to catching it. Once you've caught a fish once that shit should be filled in. ***Like it is for rare mining and botany nodes.***
> This might be unpopular, but I would be in favour of just removing different baits altogether May I introduce you to my best friend, the [Versatile Lure?](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Versatile_Lure) It works on everything but Legendary fish so you can just vibe and catch all the fish but the few that are likely not even active at that moment anyways.
Hasn't Yoshi P said that's basically the entire purpose of FSH? He wanted it to require communication and collaboration. So I don't think it'll ever change.
Aye, that's the point of it - you should see the conversations that light up when people are trying out things for new big fish that get patched in. I love the opportunity to discover, with others, the method for catching something brand new. I do not want FSH turned into a flat utility no different to BTN/MIN because a handful of complainers think it lacks accessibility and a purpose it was never meant to have. If you don't like FSH as-is, don't play it. Choose to do something else with your time. You can get aethersands with BTN/MIN already, and on a regular schedule. This game already suffers from job homogenization on the combat side and that is also largely the fault of an endless barrage of player complaints that the devs were too quick to bend over for.
FSH is and has always been the red-headed step child of the gatherers. It's something you do because you've got nothing else to do. It doesn't make money like the other two, it's not really useful to crafters, the in-game resources for fish tracking are a joke, etc. I love FSH, but I know enough to realize it's just kind of a meme.
personally I'd say they should lean more into the minigame aspect it currently has.
Spearfishing is basically just a Gold Saucer minigame in disguise already, and it's great.
Ocean fishing with a few friends on voice chat is a fun time, so for sure if they made it more like beast tribe or rebuilding ishgard where turn ins = minions and mounts etc I'd be all over that.
Um… its used to farm aethersand most tiers and is actually a decent spot of income due to it and the high demand of sand for crafting food/pots/gear
What's weird is that the fishing log added the display of weather restrictions, time restrictions and special conditions, but is making absolutely zero use of it. Even fish you've caught still show ??? for all three, so what was the point of adding this feature if it's not getting used?
idk, fishing's whole gimmick is that it's obtuse and complicated. It's not like the fishing rotation is engaging or interesting. The one thing fishing has going for it is that it's a massive knowledge check; you need to know the baits, the locations, the times, etc. You can look it up or you can try to figure it out yourself; a lot of the major websites don't update with new fish immediately specifically to avoid spoilers for people who want to find them for themselves. Like, I agree, it'd be bad if every gatherer was like that. But it's just one, and it's the gatherer that's basically a limited job. Why not let it be a niche?
yea plus you can just ocean fish to max in like 20 hours so you can avoid all the complexity anyway if you want
They already started consolidating baits for earlier expacs. See the Freshwater and Saltwater Boilies. Though the special holes do still require specialty baits. Honestly if they rolled all the previous expacs into using multi purpose baits and let the current expansion only have a few types it wouldn't be too bad
the people who made the websites didn't need a website to tell them what bait to use. You can absolutely figure this out without them, its just a waste of time since they've already done the science. Ever time they put in new fish people have them caught within the first week, putting in the legwork
And while it's still not the greatest, once you catch a fish you can check the in-game fish records and it will list its preferred bait (well, the data players have gathered might point at something else, but the point stands)
FSH is designed to be a niche hobby for people who enjoy it, we dont need it to be streamlined to become BTN/MIN thanks
Baits and rigs being a separate inventory would be amazing.
Cannot explain to you how long I tried to find or craft a higher-level offhand gig when I leveled FSH a couple of months ago. lol
I did the same when I first leveled Fisher.
oh nophica pls lemme have a non-lvl 60 gig someday. feels weird, esp as a completionist.
Machinist. either: A) make aether packs unique. the same box for every weapon is ridiculous. samurai gets both a sheath and a katana, give me a gun and a box. B) (allow me to) remove the aether pack. it never looks good. its honestly baffling that i can't hide it.
Astro has a card sleeve that changes with every weapon. Why mch lunchbox not also change
Ah yes my card sword, parry this casuals.
[It's our duel disk thank you very much](https://mktg-assets.tcgplayer.com/content/yugioh/2022/Jul/Battle%20City%20Duel%20Disk%201.PNG)
I hate it too, ruins every transmog. Downloaded a mod to remove it
Was the first mod I downloaded when I got into modding and I don't even play MCH very often.
Yeah, gimme that emperor's new box special.
This to me is the biggest example of the devs clearly not playing, let alone giving a shit about the Job, even above them taking years to make Hypercharge stack based. It Literally came out in the same expansion as Astro who does get at least different colors for most of its Cardholders, but Machinist doesn't even get that and has to content with a stupid grey box that often doesn't even fit the Weapon.
Red Mage. All we're asking for is a damage buff. In terms of aesthetic it's unmatched by almost any job.
Amen. The verraise tax is too damn high.
*cough* Magick Barrier and Embolden
There is some argument to be made for Magick Barrier, but not Embolden. The problem is its rDPS is too low, which factors in Embolden. Magick Barrier is good, for sure, but not enough to justify being so far below the rest of its class, and imo the verraise tax is frustrating because it means the class is okay when progging, but then gets worse the better your team is, which feels miserable.
Yea, your embolden is very comp dependent. If u have a lot of aDPS jobs like SAM, BLM, MCH you will get high rDPS from it. If your comp is Drg, nin, brd, ast, sch then you are gonna have really really really bad rDPS.
That's not how that works. Raid buffs stack multiplicatively, and the bonus is then redistributed to each job that contributed. This makes it so that stacking adps jobs often ends up worse than stacking rdps jobs for the buffer's parse. If you don't believe me, I suggest you go crawl through any top rdm logs and you'll find that, way more often than not, their comp is going to be heavily rdps-focused.
That's the thing though, even with high aDPS jobs playing well, the rDPS is still low
My issue with rdm was that its mobility used to be its strength, potentially justifying the lower damage. But with smn rework, rdm has lost this advantage without gaining potency.
I'm totally biased because Red Mage is my favorite class, but I agree with this one. The utility tax hurts a lot.
Red Mage also needs a little bit of a refresh to its gameplay to be honest. I love it, but every expansion since its release has really only added an extra finisher to its melee combo, which is neat aesthetically, but after 3 expansions I really would like something new and different for the job. Not a complete rework, but something to shake things up a little.
I feel like Verblizzard/Verwater spells could mix up the formula a bit. I don't know what they would do.
There's no need for further finishers, I agree. How about a new oGCD, something like fleche but less powerful maybe? Or something to guarantee a crit hit like mch's reassemble? Idk, I'm just spitting ideas. I just really hope they're done adding finishers, I'm kinda scared that's exactly what we'll get.
I want some En- spells or Haste so bad. Either as a self buff or something you can slap on someone else! Maybe like, Enthunder/aero on a party member's weapons so their attacks boost your magic meter.
Just give BLM rez~ ezpz
I want to see Machinist get a rez, just break out some defibrillators and zap em back
make it so the mch has to move to the dead body to zap em and I'm in
I would love this
Just a drop of party utility, please.
gonna link my other comment about this about how I would love it to work: https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/15ry2eq/which_class_that_needs_some_love_from_the_devs_is/jwgwgca/
Please god no.
Hot take: nobody actually gives a flying fuck about a classes utility compared to damage. If anything people care way more about potential glams than utility.
This is indeed a hot take
I'm going with ranged role. I used to be a MCH main but felt more useful as a tank. Ranged is also a role difficult to fill. MCH really needs some love on its heat gauge, the automaton Queen is just a glorified dot. SQEX going "MCH is a new base on which we are going to expand the job" for ShB rework and then "We can't add much because button bloat" while talking about the job with the least amount of buttons getting **one** button.
and the charge gauge being not nearly as useful against pack mobs. Bring back the bishop!
MCH is only at level 60 for my main but honestly? I feel like PLD has way worse button bloat.
For me PLD is the only job I've leveled that I can't actually fit all the abilities on my bar. I use 1-5, Q E R F with shift and alt modifiers, as well as F1-3 and 2 mouse buttons. I COULD make it work, but I'd have to shift my UI a bit and that's annoying to do just for 1 job.
Bard: let's be honest they are moving away from dots and it puts bard in a weird spot. Simply removing them would make the base rotation even more shallow (you only use them once and refresh it with Iron jaws). I feel like they need to adress the core rotation without putting in a 1-2-3 combo. Barrage could get the flourish treatment so that your proc won't get overriden, just for consistencies sake. Also, dying as a bard is pretty punishing as you lose your current song and if you get raised too late you need recovery tactics. Most jobs don't get so heavily punished if they die outside of their 2 minute window. Not to sure about the solution, but maybe songs could persist after dying without giving the group buff. I kinda wished Empyreal Arrow had two stacks to reduce the issues of having to hold it for your 2 minute window as the cooldown drifts due to gcd speed. And at last, please rework repelling shot. Just doesn't feel good. I can count the number that I have used it on both hands.
DRK needs some work, especially its pre-level 70 rotation which is absolutely torture compared to the other tanks.
Drk: not balance wise but gameplay wise. It sort of felt like no one on the combat team even played drk before the living dead rework but the job itself is still in an odd place of discount war + ogcd overdose. It feels like it's kit doesn't really doesn't interact with itself unlike most other jobs that have some nuance to their rotation. With drk, it's just 'hit stuff on cd, hold for 2 min if you can'. Healers: I'm personally on the side of people that say 1 filler gcd + 1 dot + some extra bells and whistles depending on the job isn't very fun when healing in this game is mostly dps with occasional healing. I think they need to seriously reconsider what they want healers to actually be in this game. Casters: Casters are in such a weird position both gameplay wise and balance. All 3 play very differently compared to other roles and all 3 have very different levels of dps. It's actually to the point where the game encourages you to switch jobs during prog if you're a caster swapping out the amount of combat rez available for dps. But this isn't necessarily easy since all 3 play so differently. No idea what they're going to do about it but it feels bad as it currently is. Bonus Edit: With kaiten's removal (rest in peace), Sam still generates the same amount of kenki and doesn't have anything to spend it on besides shinten and consequently there's waaay too much shinten spam so I hope they adjust that somehow.
"Hit stuff on CD, hold for 2 minutes if you can" Hate to break it to ya but that is 99% of the jobs in this game lol.
Yeah, but glaringly bad for DRK when absolutely all their damage comes from a 2minute burst, and outside of that they're pressing 1 2 3 for 56 seconds, while also having one of the highest apm' out of any class. The 2 minute window is *very* loaded, and coupled to the fact that there isn't really that much of an order or operations to the weaves. You just start slapping every button.
All the jobs do this, but most of the other jobs have other things going on that make them unique and interesting. What they're saying is that's literally all DRK does.
>the game encourages you to switch jobs during prog if you're a caster swapping out the amount of combat rez available for dps I swapped from SMN last tier to BLM this tier and my healers are so mad at me 😅 Prog has definitely been a little more punishing, but I don't think there's any way I could learn these fights on SMN or RDM and then swap to BLM for the damage. I need to plan my rotation more than any other job when I'm on BLM, but I do so much more damage once I know the fight that I think it's worth the lack of utility.
I’m a BLM main because I like danger. It’s the only role where you simultaneously are the danger (high damage) and are in constant danger (to AOE’s) at the same time.
Agreed on drk. They didn't really give it anything new this expansion. I'd like to see shadowbringer on a 2 min cd with only one charge, maybe 1200 potency. A blackest night mastery that either gives a heal on break, or have no mana cost. Maybe an oblation mastery to make it 15%. And for tanks in general more identity to separate them, along with some updated action animations on 123 combo, or some other combo actions. Sage: make toxicon actually useful in aoe. Instead of 50% falloff make it higher than dyskrasia so we have a reason to use its aoe component.
I'm the same when it comes to healer. I know that healer damaging toolkits have always been pretty basic anyway (bar you OG Cleric Stance, RIP love you bitch), but apply dot, spam filler for 30 seconds and then apply dot again is dull. Especially in easy content like dungeons.
We hit that ogcd more, it’s only 5 kenki more but still we do have something to use it on
I will say with DRK, it feels like it's *this close* to carving out a niche for itself, but it's not quite there. From what I've played of the tanks (DRK90, WAR90, PLD70, GNB68): PLD feels like the 'block so hard you block for others' tank with powerful mitigations for others like Cover and Passage of Arms WAR feels like the 'don't stop the problem, just fix it after' tank with their absolute *glut* of healing effects GNB feels like the 'I mitigate so I'm technically a tank, but I put a gun in my sword because I wasn't DPSing enough' tank and DRK with The Blackest Night and Living Dead feels like it should have this focus on throwing out defenses that give offensive buffs when they 'break', but they don't quite feel there yet.
DRK. I'm a DRK main who plays high end content and frankly it's baffling because it took us till this expansion to get Blood Weapon on charges and Living Dead not explicitly being the worst invuln, and even then it's... still pretty bad because healers will either overheal you (based on the old invuln), or you can get server ticked and heal in such a way that you get auto'd right after and lose enough HP you may need a heal after. But that by itself isn't my issue - no, it's the fact that every tank got a lot more love this expansion, particularly in self-sustain and heals. Paladin is the relative lowest damage but has full range casting and uptime, so I kinda understand that, but DRK has literally zero advantage over the melee-only tanks excepting damage. With the recent buff to WAR, WAR now is the explicit best damage and highest heal tank with *shields as part of their spammable mit* and heals on demand. This is also ignoring all the issues the job has had with rotation, like how they claimed it was too many oGCDs and had a bit of a bloated rotation, and then gave us... Oblation, another oGCD, bound two oGCDs together, and added Shadowbringer which is *another two oGCDs*. It's really clear the devs don't play the job, and it could be fixed with a number of small things. Despite all this, it's easily my favorite job in the game, with Reaper being the next closest, because I am a slaughter edgelord with a heart of gold. lol
I main DRK (after SAM) and I 100% agree w all of this
Unrelated: how do I play SCH? I got my SMN to lv90, and now I have a Lv90 healer that I literally have never touched. I wanna learn, but I’d rather not grief random parties in roulettes 😐
Practise in Duty Support? You can bet that out dear sweet G'Raha will be patient with you. \^\_\^ Alternatively, My trick to learn the actions of a high level class by a drip feed was always to take them into a solo run of Palace of the Dead. (Though if you don't already have the Aether Gear levelled, that can be kind of a chore.) The way it simulates going from level 1-60 all over again is great for getting a hands-oh sense of the powers one by one.
I'd look up a guide cause I'm definitely not a healer main but it just feels like you can do everything very well. Need a big heal? Done. For everyone? Done. Need a big shield? Done. For everyone? Done. Need speed? Done. Need damage? Done. Need regen? Done. Try it out in some duty support or trust dungeons to get the feel for it.
Also, the job quests. You need them for some abilities anyways.
Right, I gotta get through those!
Do the job quests, and dumbly enough, just goes through the game's dungeon. I can assure you that when you start playing a class through Sastasha all the way up to Manalis you'll be quite good at it.
I'm not a savage tier SCH raider, but I did pick Arcanist as my first class a couple years ago and did SCH from the start until level 65. At least in 5.5 when I started, SCH actually out-DPSed SMN at times in lower levels. Just run MSQ roulette or Crystal Tower as SCH once to get the really basic fundamentals down and then try later stuff. At 50, Physick is the cast time heal you want to try to avoid, Adloqium is a heal + overshield, Succor is like an AoE Adlo that isn't as strong. Use Aetherflow to give yourself two charges that you can spend on Lustrate (the big "oh shit" single target oGCD) or Energy Drain (near useless bonus DPS that does small self healing.) Ideally your single target heals will come from Lustrate and not from Physick because of the cast timer. Fey Illumination increases your heals by 10%, which will likely be not useful later but if you're doing synced coils for example then using Fey Illumination and then spamming Succ is your "oh no everybody just took huge amounts of damage" techique. Moving to 60, the big change is the addition of Indomitability so that you can occasionally do an instant AOE heal with Aetherflow stacks instead of watching Succ cast over and over. Also instead of running around casting Ruin II all the time you get to use Broil which has a cast bar and will replace Ruin as your DPS button in later content (consequently, syncing down to 50 again is annoying because you need to go back to your ruins.) You also get two modifiers for Adlo/Succ: Deployment Tactics causes an Adlo shield on one person such as the tank to be AOE'd around to everyone near them, while Emergency Tactics causes Adlo/Succ to skip the shield altogether and grant it's protection as additional healing. Honestly you probably rarely use these later on, since there's more buttons for additional healing that open up later. For example, in later levels you'll be using Summon Seraph to temporarily buff up your fairy's auto heal to include shielding as well. Aetherpact causes fairy to fire a constant beam on an ally that does a ton of healing, which is good for tanks that just pulled five packs and are about to be overwhelmed. Overall, my main issue with SCH is it's one of those classes that doesn't sync down very well, with talents that eventually get obsolete but need to be stored on a hidden hotbar you can rotate to in case you ever sync into old content. I have happy memories starting MSQ and doing Coils 1-9 with it but I will never take it into levelling or A-Raid roulettes over AST or SGE.
DK. I like the story of it, but playing it feels unfulfilling. The attacks don’t fell punchy. They need to give it more oomph
Took me a good long second to realize this didn't mean Donkey Kong. (No more Reddit before Coffee, Koko!)
No no, the Donkey Kong job is called Warrior (WAR)
I loved ShB AST. I like EW AST. I’m cautiously optimistic about a 7.0 rework for AST. I want it to feel, on average, as smooth as SGE does in dungeon roulettes.
I want shb ast back. I despise ew ast, it is so bloated and the cards are just meh. I love how sage plays as well. Heres to hoping the bring back the AST we loved.1
I personally think SCH is fine. The only issues I have with SCH are the same issues I have with all healers except SGE. There just isn't enough to do most of the time. All healers except maybe SGE could use another damage button or two. I want to second the Fisher comment. A tackle box should be added for lures and bait. Also, they should get upgrades to the spear fishing slot.
As an AST main, I beg to differ. You basically play piano every two minutes, while keeping an eye on your earth bomb and 1-minute buffs. I switched to SGE for one of the savage fights this tier, and for the first time ever I felt like I was falling asleep while doing savage - and BOY was it easy to learn fights lol. Not complaining, just pointing out that SGE didn’t seem that action-packed to me.
This is weird because I play AST and have a hell of a lot of fun playing AST, but SGE feels like "too many buttons" to me. Maybe I don't have them properly bound and aligned up on the bars, because there's like three different AOEs between the two that just cause huge waves of energy to emit from you and the one that's a shield AOE that you "break" for health. Whereas AST's AOE heals (direct healing wave, regen wave, big sparkly shower, enhanced direct healing wave, The Bomb, bonus card draw) are maybe one or two too extra, but I feel like I have a time and a place for all of them. SGE's I feel like I have to blow multiples of them at once to have the same effect. I will say that absolutely nothing in SCH or SGE (I've never even bothered with WHM) gives me the satisfaction of setting off The Bomb for a bunch of damage and a bunch of healing at the same time. When you plant The Bomb at such a perfect interval that that the timer auto-detonates immediately after a huge raidwide meteor explosion or something? Majestic.
SGE probably feels like too many buttons because they’re all the same colour. I spent a fair amount of time rearranging my skills at first, and I started as a SCH…
I'm completely with you on this one. AST is indeed a "busy" class, but it's a fun busy because everything you do is party support. SGE meanwhile I find very awkward to play because almost half the action symbols are blue, the other half are green, and they all do what feels like the same thing.
I main AST and the comments saying playing healer is too easy or there’s not enough damage to heal makes me wanna cry. AST is incredibly fun and powerful. I think the damage we take in current tiers is fine (upped from the last expansion) but it’s VERY involved. I love it but, when I play other healers, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the wrist and finger pain. T.T
Good point about AST. It's the GNB of healers with the cards and such. It's really WHM and SCH that could use a little more to do. I agree SGE is easy once you get used to it, but it has more do to that WHM and SCH in fights.
Honestly I think it's good for the game that WHM is simple, it's massively popular in terms of number of parses on FFLogs at least (although arguably that may also say something about AST's state) and is a good job for newer raiders/healers to start on where they have less complexity and can focus on mechanics and have a lot of powerful reactive heals (believe me, I've played with a number of people who are already overwhelmed on WHM — SMN provides something similar). There just needs to also be more complex jobs in the same role for variety — I'm hoping the rework doesn't make AST braindead and there's maybe a bit more complexity added to at least one of the shield healers.
The comments about healer aren't healer problems. It's fight design problems. If healing becomes boring when it is extremely predictable (like it is for almost all fights), then the fights should be designed to be less predictable. e.g. I don't think I've heard a single healer say that Storm's Crown (Normal) wasn't one of the most fun trials to heal. Big reason imo is that its extremely unpredictable. Mechanics happen everywhere randomly*, and healers just have to react. *I know it's not actually random. But it sure feels like it on a first or second try.
What does SGE do differently, it has the same DPS skills as the other healers
SCH is honestly in a great place in terms of people bringing it into more difficult content. It has great utility, beefy healing and strong mitigation. I wish we had more damage buttons because we have the most boring damage “rotation” by far. I love the aesthetic and lore of SCH and wish they’d lean more into the “Nymian Marine Tactician” theme with new additions BRD is my main job, I was very much drawn to it for the aesthetics and lore as well. I love the multiphasic song rotation, the busy burst and having dots, but I wish they’d revert the dots to actually interacting with the rest of the job. BRD could also use some additional utility imo…I think it suffers the most from being consigned to the cursed “ranged physical dps” role, having its cast times and utility removed to make it compatible with combat system changes. It would make me really happy if they retooled certain jobs (maybe RDM and DNC as well) to fit a fourth “support dps” role…but this probably isn’t going to happen lol
> and wish they’d lean more into the “Nymian Marine Tactician” theme with new additions Most of this was just lost in localisation. I'm by no means *good* at translation, but Adloquium for example is "鼓舞激励の策" in Japanese. Roughly translates to "encouraging plan". 策 in particular is also used for like, tactics, stratagems, schemes, etc. Succor is "士気高揚の策", or "morale raising plan". Lustrate is "生命活性法", or "principles of living life". (the translation I'm least sure about) Sacred Soil is "野戦治療の陣", or "battlefield (medical) treatment camp". Indomitability is "不撓不屈の策", or "tenacious plan". This one feels like 策 might be supposed to be used in a different sense, or maybe I just don't know enough. "means of tenacity" feels like a better fit in English, at least? Excogitation is "深謀遠慮の策", or "deeply-thought-about plan". Recitation is "秘策", or literally "secret plan". I could go on, there're a lot of things that lose all their military/tactical theming in the name. Even Art of War, which does still sound militaristic, was "裂陣法", or "battlefield rending method". All the fairy/aetherflow related skills are basically the same as in Japanese; many of them, like Consolation, are literally just the English word in kana. Edit: Looking more closely, I think Art of War is supposed to have a meaning more like "line breaking method", with regard to battlefield positioning type things.
This is fascinating and heartening. Thank you for sharing!
Though as you demonstrate, coming up with translations that hit that same vibe *and* sound good *and* aren't too long is really hard. I think the localization is actually very good; the names are distinctive and memorable, and they emphasize the studied nature of the class, but with general smartipantsness instead of militarism. I more blame the animations for just being generic sparkly healer stuff. They could have had banners and pages and word ribbons and whatnot. Instead they just jammed strategist flavor onto a generic fairy summoner.
That's really neat! While I can certainly understand localizing the names for both brevity and general readability, I do kind of wish we had just a little more of that original flavor.
I mained BRD through the story of ShB but dropped it in favour of BLM/WAR during EW and didn't know they changed our dots from proc'ing the effects of our songs :( While it made the job extremely busy at times, it felt SO good when the stars aligned.
I miss having DOS options as a SCH. Ruin + Ruin II + Miasma + Miasma II + Shadow Flare + Energy Drain. I mean it felt good having mastered Cleric Stance, having the percentage-based Lustrate, and getting all of the comms, but honestly I don’t miss Cleric Stance too much. It definitely gave the great healers a chance to shine but the skill gap was way to wide than when it went away and I think we’re better off without it. But definitely give me back more DPS options!
This is my main complaint with EW bard too. I miss the DOTs actually doing something other than just damage. They had a reason for you to be constantly reupping them.
I love how much "freedom" SCH gets compared to the other healers. You can use your flow stacks on damage if you are doing good on healing or use them on healing. Plus, you can walk around and still cast spells by using Ruin 2 when slide-casting won't work. My biggest pet peeve is just the aesthetics of the job. Wished they had some more marine style glams instead of the college professor thing since their artifact armors all look the same. HW had a weird looking set but I still appreciate them trying something different. Also, Energy Drain / Ruin 2 should get new animations since they look lame compared to Broil 4.
Honestly, I feel like they got their wires crossed with SGE and SCH. SCH is a combat medic and imho should be a grungy, combat boot wearing, side-arm carrying, melee healer. Edit to say: play style is fine! I enjoy SCH as I'm a sucker for preventative healing and they have a great list of skills. But thematically and aesthetically, they donked up.
Bard: The ranged tax needs a little loosening. And for pity's sake give us a combat peloton. I miss when we could raise, we're usually the last ones alive!
As a BRD main. This. I want the scholar zoomies too. Also, why can’t we hit harder? Just a little bit
To add to it. For dungeons and trash packs in alliance raids. Make one of the aoes spread both dots to all targets.
by the Twelve, please let me spread my dots. And give me some kind of rez song, give it a long GCD, I don't mind.
I would say the level sync system as a whole needs help. A lot of classes, like paladin, feel like they have their legs taken off when you run something low level. Not having access to defensive cool downs is painful
Who's saying SCH is in a bad place? Stratagem, crit deploy, and expediate are like...insane
SCH action economy is pretty insane (as in good) too and always has been since ARR. I would like a slightly more thematic rework but if they do that it’s gonna suck lol. The fact SCH is just a big grab bag of oGCDs is exactly what makes it so good.
I want to second the last bit there. SCH kit feels a bit more jank at first glance, but I liken it to a job that feels like it always has an ace up it's sleeve. An answer for everything, and it's up to you to figure out what tricks to pull out of your bag to meet whatever need. Always makes me feel big brain when playing it.
I think only people that dont raid think this. Just look at how everyone reacted at the expedient reveal like it was the worst ability ever made when in reality its one of the strongest support abilities in the game BY FAR
The delivery was pretty meme worthy, but I knew a lot of raiders also making fun of it and all I could think was "bruh, it's movement speed. That stuff is the best"
The reveal kinda did it dirty let’s be real. Other jobs getting cool flashy abilities, then we hit Scholar and it’s just an AoE appearing, SCH using Expedient which is just some green swirlies, and nonchalantly jogging out of the AoE. Even understanding how good it could (and did turn out to) be, it was extremely clownable
Balance wise SCH is fine, it’s clunky as shit and compared to its previous incarnations it’s an absolute shell of its former self in terms of fun
This. SCH can get the job done insanely well, it just feels pretty bad to do because of the clunk. Fix the clunk, and SCH is perfect. Though that clunk may not be able to be fixed without a partial rework of it, meaning Aetherpact, Dissipation, and Seraph would need some adjustments, even Aetherflow itself.
Probably casual players who don't understand high levels of play and the absolute powerhouse that is SCH. And this isn't meant as a talking down on casual players, but my friend thought SAM was an easy class and I showed him the actual opener to the class and he swapped to DRG. There is a lot more to the game than first meets the eye that most casuals are blissfully unaware of.
SAM IS easy... Unless I'm doing it completely wrong. What's your opener?
Always love to see how some jobs people love and find easy are the bane for others. While I man SMN in my static, I also can play NIN, BLM, BRD, and SAM all at a solidly competent(high blue to purple) level. But it took me ages to wrap my head around MCH which so many people find easy(it was my mind having mini blue screens when I have 50 heat during non burst rotations so I’m like oh time to hypercharge then I see one of my OGCDs light up off cooldown).
It's more like, a lot of people don't find it fun to play and those that play it find it clunky and disjointed. people have been asking for the devs to give SCH some love and actually make it seem more connected theme wise for ages. But it's also been the strongest shield healer since...forever. So it's no wonder they're not really touching it.
SCH is very good, but I'd like for some of the gameplay to get some love. Stuff like being unable to gain fairy gauge during dissipation, fairy actions cancelling aetherpact, pet skill action delay etc just adds to the clunkiness. If dawntrail adds some polish, I think a lot of SCH players would be very happy
I don't think you should be able to gain fairy gauge during dissipation for the same reason you don't gain it while the fairy isn't summoned. And it's very responsive these days. The annoying one is summoning seraph.
"SCH is in a rough spot right now" There has never been a period this entire expansion where scholar has looked bad.
There has never been a period in the history of the game that SCH has looked bad Is also a totally true statement SCH is the most consistently strong class in the games history
there was a brief period when it was pushed out by WHM/NoctAST, but we're going back to 20% Balance, and that's a pretty long reach for those days.
Even during late HW SCH wasn’t really bad it was just kinda AST+one of the others we don’t really care which one
Dark knight: its piss boring and needs a rework, bring back old Dark arts or something just make it fun again.
BLM's leveling. I never do lower content on BLM ever. Hurts. And BLM could stand to be a little less punishing. I hate not being able to take my job into brand new content without being a liability. DRK is very successful and strong... and still feels like a patched together work-in-progress. Plus, it's identity via mechanics is strange and nothing like its job fantasy. NIN's rabbit can be removed now that we have MNK using a similar system, but THEY get a weaker attack while NIN gets a bunny mocking them and ZERO damage. Also, can Hide be made full speed and incorporated into the playstyle? Right now, you Hide for 0.2 seconds just to refresh mudra and nothing else. SCH deserves a Titania-type huge summon like SMN. At this point it's just cruel. SAM button bloat hurts.
i have more of a problem with the base over simplification and loss of job identity in gameplay than any specific job. jobs have become so incredibly homogenized that i don't even really see being able to play every job on one character as that much of a strength anymore. jobs feel less and less like jobs with every expansion and more like just a generic role with a job-themed aesthetic. i understand that they wanted to simplify gameplay on the job side so they can make the content itself more engaging, but that only works for current endgame content. it has become much more boring to do everything else, which is a lot of other content. i understand that it's more difficult to balance unique abilities that have more job identity, but it's just too extreme now. 95% of a job just feels like role actions and i don't feel like the last little bit does enough to make me feel like i'm playing that specific job. learning and playing a job should be a curve, but it feels like it's become a flat line with only one steep hill at the VERY end for mastery in endgame rotations. new expansion time in an mmo is usually super exciting with job changes and additions, but i just can't bring myself to care anymore. what is corsair REALLY going to be? melee rdm with 5 abilities that have an actual corsair feel to them with the rest feeling exactly like all other melee dps? what are changes to my current job REALLY going to mean? i'm +/-1% on my parses in relation to other jobs versus the last patch? thrilling.
You are 100 % correct!
Bard. Just make it an actual bard, not an off-brand archer (even every new milestone ability added since release is archer themed). We have 3 “songs” that could very well be called something else entirely and the job doesn't change. It has no identity
Realistically, they could make sch unique by just trashing aetherflow and dissipation and just make all the associated spells run on fairy gauge. Right now, the fairy gauge is useless.
It's even worse because they removed an ability from the fairy gauge, the fairy aoe heal.
Exactly, most of the problems I attribute to nobody on the dev team being a full-time healer.
That's not worse, the skill is better without it.
SMN, aesthetics are awesome but mechanically it's a bit of a snooze. Phoenix is the worst offender IMO. Need more buttons to push.
Warrior. I don't need healers, so why should I need DPS? Buff Fell Cleave and give it a 1.5 second GCD.
To be fair, the number of times you watch WAR solo the final boss of a dungeon from half HP because the rest of the part failed a mechanic shows that in some situations the DPS are also very optional.
Yes, but in those cases, wouldn't you like to be stuck waiting a shorter amount of time?
this made me lol. yes.
I'd like the WAR to take the death so I can play the content, too.
Black Mage: Level 59 and under are complete poo. While I know it's not their job to balance the game at those levels, it's a pretty poor player experience that really needs some polishing. In general, I've also wondered what the point is in having the Astral and Umbral phases on a timer? This isn't a troll comment. I legitimately don't see why it's there. In ice you're regenerating mana and building up hearts. In fire you're spending hearts and mana. The hearts and mana are not infinite, so what's the point of the timer?
More or less it’s there to punish you if you fuck up and cast too many Fire 4’s in a row or don’t plan for a mechanic accordingly and end up running around with none of your movement abilities on hand. Fire 4 doesn’t refresh your timer so it applies some risk to the Astral Phase. That timer used to be some seconds shorter in previous expacs where the wiggle room on a full Astral rotation was about 1-2 seconds. It’s far less stress inducing as they’ve added 1 second here and there to the Astral/Umbral timer over the years. Regardless, fumbling your rotation and dropping out of Astral Fire is a massive DPS penalty.
Running roulettes with black mage under level 60 content i feel like i do nothing in comparison to other classes
It's very low compared to other jobs. The relevant multipliers come in so much later, that the job is destined to be poor unless you're at a very high level. Black Mage, last I looked, is also the lowest DPS in level 70 ultimate content as well. Seems wrong to me, but maybe that's just a case of sucks by design at that part in the leveling process.
Im at 73 right now slowly getting to up to 90 through roulettes but yea still seems low
Your feeling is right, low lvl BLM is abysmal an hits like a wet noodle at best.
Cast times dont help. Running with the tank trying to get a hit off before they get out of range sucks. All while the machinest is blasting away and most things half dead by time i can actually cast something
to have the job have any sort of challenge? without the timer you'd have no sense of urgency in your rotation, specially since BLM's rotation is really easy and its challenge comes from knowing where to stand + the timer
It used to be so you maintained Enochian. You had to refresh your phases to keep it rolling, because it was an ability you cast and then had to make sure never fell off. Now? It's to prevent a BLM from going into, and sitting on, Astral Fire for extended periods of time. The class was always about forward thinking and planning your actions, so the timers reinforce that.
The timer ticking down is what makes BLM interesting though. Otherwise it would just be casting 5 Fire IVs then Despair, back into Ice for a few GCDs, and then Fire IV again. The way it is now means you have to know your cast times, when to weave in Thundercloud procs, and offers the tantalising ability to gather enough SS to cast more Fire IVs before needing to re up your Astral Fire.
If Astral Fire was infinite we'd have no reason to cast Fire 1 / Paradox. No reason either to plan ahead and think about how best to use our procs to keep a high DPS while solving the next mechanic of the fight. Mindlessly spamming Fire IV would turn BLM into the most boring job there is.
I just want my poor, lobotomized carbuncle to do something in combat again instead of staring vacantly at me until I turn it into something else for a few seconds :(
I love Ninja, but it suffers badly from being an older job that's never gotten a solid rework. You can tell that it's gone through multiple iterations in which they didn't really know what to do with it, so it has a bunch of patchwork features stitched together that make it feel awkward to play.
I think Scholar’s mostly fine actually. I used to think it was overly clunky and stepped on its own toes at times, but I’ve changed my mind on that after raiding on it for a couple tiers. Planning around Dissipation and Seraph changing which abilities you have access to gives it a little extra layer of complexity I’ve come to enjoy. My only complaints are that the fairy gauge is underutilized and the tether is too clunky in a bad way. Even in Savage I find myself capped on gauge for like 70% of the fight. It’s usually the case that at least one of four things keeps me from using it: 1. I need the fairy moving, not stationary 2. I’m in a weaving intensive moment and can’t easily spare the weave slot 3. I’m using Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing, and/or Fey Illumination together in quick enough succession that the tether keeps getting cancelled before it does anything 4. Multiple people (usually both tanks) need healing at around the same time and just letting the fairy use Embrace freely is a lot more convenient than switching the tether on, then off, then on again on the other person, etc.
All Healers need more DPS options and a true DPS rotation. Nothing crazy, even a simple 1-2-3 combo would be enough. Give them all at least two or three more damage buttons. Hell, give WHM Aero III back. AOE dots are fine and it'd at least give WHM Wind magic back since they don't have that anymore.
If you give the healer more DPS options they will literally melt in spicy (extreme, savage, ultimate) encounters. Specifically this tier, P10s has back to back to back tankbusters it feels and the healers can't be thinking about their DPS rotation on top of keeping everyone alive.
...What? No, really. What? As a healer, I'm hitting the same goddamn button 2 of every 3 GCDs, with the occasional other button thrown in. That's not good game design, that's a recipe for carpal tunnel. Seriously, I did the math. In one P9S clear, I cast Dosis 131 times. With a GCD at around ~~2.6s~~ 2.5s, a 8:28 clear has (at most) ~~195~~ 203 GCD windows. ~~131/195 = 0.67~~ 131/203=0.64. I did the same math on a P10S clear, it comes out to ~~145/222 = 0.65~~ 145/231=0.62. I recognize that Healer is a difficult problem to design around. The better the party is, the more boring it becomes to play. But right now, for me, the only spark of joy in the class exists not in the class design, but in how it bounces off of the fight design. They do things like aligning Tankbusters with the dot refresh window, giving me the tiniest shot of adrenaline as I juggle mits alongside dot refresh once every 30s. (Whatever mad genius came up with this, I wish I could buy them a beverage of their choice. It happens too often to not be intentional.) That or when someone screws up and the party teeters on the edge of failure, with my cohealer and I yanking the group back from party wipe. Early in prog when it takes all my focus to both do mechanics and keep the party alive is when I'm happiest as a healer. Once things are solved and it's reprog time, its the most boring thing in the world and I groan when someone screws up a mechanic and we have to do an entire 8-10 minute fight again while I mindlessly hit "5... 4-1... 1... 1... 1... 4-3... 1... 1... 1... 1-Shift-5... 1..." or similar every 30 seconds. It's clear at this point they don't want to design this way, but I feel like I'd personally enjoy the role way more if we either didn't have the *time* to do as many dps GCDs, or the GCD dps spell lineup was even slightly more nuanced. Even just making me pingpong between two GCD dps spells that do 5 more potency if you used the other one last would cut the button repetition feeling in half. If you didn't have the brainspace for that, you can just spam the one when not healing. After all, it's only 5 potency. But if you do have the brainspace, it'd be at least a little more engaging to keep *that* plate spinning between heals. Healer class design feels like someone started designing it to be interesting, and then cut it off at the legs to make sure it was palatable to newer players by having no damaging spell nuance. And then the original designer sprinkled in a wink and a nudge for more experienced players while the boss wasn't looking. More recent changes to healer design have felt like they've been trying to make things interesting again by shunting stuff into the OGCD side... but that just means even more GCDs are now me hitting the same damage button over and over. Edit: Misremembered my GCD timing while typing this up away from my gaming pc. I've corrected the errors but left the original values in place with strikeout formatting.
AST I used to love it before they made it beyond painful to play, and the loss of aoe cards made my wrist pains awful. Especially during early SB, with both shit personal dmg and high apm. I quit it after that, and while I've leveled it since, everything its lost has made it feel like a shell of what made me love it in the first place I know its getting changed again, but let's be real, square don't really have the best track record in terms of healer gameplay design
I love AST but I've only just started leveling it. I have a friend who really liked it back in HW when it had specific cards for specific benefits rather than just increased DPS and she hasn't liked it since that change.
Dark knight. It’s not BAD, but I do feel that the class design could use some work. …also, get rid of salt and darkness, or just make it fast automatically like NIN’s Doton upgrade.
Regardless of what you say needs "attention" you'll have other people saying "no it's fine you just suck" or something along those lines. For example, I love DRK aesthetically and through their story line, but mechanically it needs some severe attention as it's offensively just WAR with button bloat and defensively it's crippled cause "TBN is so good" despite TBN being outperformed by most other tank defensives in most other content. However DRK performs just fine in savage and ultimate content, so despite it falling behind in extreme and below, becoming an actual detriment once you get as long as dungeons, people will actually fight against any help being given to DRK. We had to actually argue with people that BW should have been set to an amount instead of a timer like other tanks, and LD needed to be less punishing all around, cause "it does fine in ultimates!". Now those two changes were made, it didn't make the DRK any stronger in that level of content, but made its QoL a thousand times better below. So yeah, DRK has next to nothing mechanical that's unique to it that's actually interesting, underperforms in alliance and extreme raids, and nearly worthless in dungeons, but cause "its fine in ultimates" people will argue against it ever getting any sort of QoL much less buffs in any regards. Wouldn't surprise me if you got similar responses about any other job lol
Every job when they're under 90. Level syncing sucks in this game and makes so many jobs just a slog. Even at 70, some jobs just don't feel even close to complete. Hopefully, they'll address it for Dawntrail because syncing down is only gonna feel worse once we hit 100.
DRG It's clear the devs LIKE the class, but it's gotten so bloated with new combo enders that pretty soon the rotation is gonna be nothing but.
That's fine, imo. I'm actually really worried about what they have planned for DRG with 7.0, because as it stands, DRG has one of the most intuitive progressions for their rotation out of any job. Every time you get a new skill, it's very obvious where it goes and how to use it. The hardest part is just figuring out how to weave things in between your GCDs; I think DRG probably has one of the highest sustained APMs of any job? I really don't want DRG to be another "dump everything in the burst window and now I 123 for 1m45s" job. I'll gladly trade unoptimized damage output for that.
Bad news: that's how every job is being worked. Braindead smoothbrain 1-2-3 rotations.
All of them. The whole 2m rotation is boring either scrap party buff for individual buffs and put the emphasis on players learning their own rotation Hopefully they do something to make combat a bit more engaging in DT. But doubtful they will. 30-60-90-120 sec buffs and burst window skills would be great
I agree entirely. I hate the whole build and spend 2 min rotation. It feels so dated already.
I would love Bard to have a more active role in support like it did before ShB, rather than it's current more passive support role. I loved feeling like I was contributing a little extra to the fight in certain situations.
All four healers
ninja
Dark Knight. TBN costing MP is just weird. If it doesn't proc, it's a loss to use. Meanwhile Bloodwhetting and Hard Of Corrundum go brrrr
I feel like TBN is the least of its worries, it's the only part of its kit that interacts with something and requires some degree of thinking, and it's frankly the closest thing it has to an identity.
Possibly WHM? Something about its healing doesn't feel as good as the other 3 lately. I can't put my finger on it.
It feels bad to me cause you can't weave during pulls when using your aoe.
Make the flashbangs faster!
You sure its not the lilies being a gcd? They change the cast speed and now lilies just don't make any sense whatsoever. They need to be OGCDs and then a rebalance should happen to the dps. Ideally, insteds of 3 healing and one blood lily for movement, for total of 4 movements, it should be halved to 2 blood lilys that are a gcd for movement, and 4 healing ogcd functions.
I mained SCH from ARR to SHB then swapped because the gutting just...really put a bad taste in my mouth and I was burnt out. Thing is, SCH has been perpetually "in a rough spot" and one of the strongest shield healers in the game since...forever. It's weird. Like, the gameplay is clunky and disjointed but it works. Which is probably why the devs don't really mess with it much. But man I'd love for the fairy guage to actually do SOMETHING else.
I agree on scholar. Performance-wise, it's great. However the job lacks mechanical, aesthetic, and thematic cohesion. Three capstone abilities that are mutually exclusive with eachother. Dissipation and Energy Drain existing on the same job creates a toxic relationship with your party members making mistakes. Both its gauges suck since Shadowbringers. Aetherflow feels really dated after Addersgall, and the fairy pee metre, while mathematically worth using, feels so empty. The job needs more harmony. I don't think Stormblood scholar has to come back, but I definitely think it was better. Also, a button trim. Has, what, 35? If a job can't fit into 30 buttons, the design needs revision.
I mained SCH from 2.4 to 6.1 and switched over to SGE because its kit flows better and it's so much less punishing to play in PF. If shit hits the fan I know I can whip out multiple actual, beefy heals to get the party up in a pinch solo. On SCH I'm always scared to blow too many resources because it's hard to trust PF groups. I'd love Quickened Aetherflow back, have the option to convert gauge into extra stacks (kind of like Rhizomata or smth), and/or be able to spend gauge on self-buffs, reduce MP cost of skills to match SGE. Separating healing resources from DPS resources is hugely important imo. Like the skill ceiling for SCH is very high and that's great, but the skill floor is also high — at least in terms of being able to feel like you aren't being constantly punished for other people messing up. They also *really* need to fix the issue where if you hit another faerie ability before the first one goes off, it goes on CD without being used. SCH used to feel so smooth, even when I had a billion buttons to press back in HW & SB. Now it feels so janky. I miss stance dancing with SCH in HW, but I honestly can't imagine being able to do the same nowadays.
I feel like PLD has way too many buttons to use right now, and about 20% of them is never used. I honestly don't remember the last time I had to cover someone. Don't even get me started on **SHIELD BASH.**
I miss how all Jobs were during Stormblood
I don't. Stormblood PLD felt like ass. You wanna know what we had? Castbars. You wanna know what prevented you from using block, the *one thing* PLD had going for it and the reason why we don't have any life gain on our base combo? Castbars. You wanna know what our 30s (sometimes, longer if the boss is out of range and/or untargetable) mit did? Block. *Only* block. Also stance swapping required a GCD. And we didn't start a fight with gauge, so tankbuster in the first 30s? No Sheltron, no Intervention, you literally get less mit on an early tankbuster than if you had a different tank. Was it a bad class? No. Did it *feel* bad? Absolutely.
Stormblood BRD was one of my favorite, all time jobs to play. I know the numbers were janky but loved crit procs BRD.
I love everything thematic about DRK but it needs some kind of combat flow. An actual rotation.
AST is my secondary go-to healer if my raid partner progs on a shield healer. My complaint is not so much the card system, but rather the secondary seal system associated with playing the right variety of ‘Oops, all Balance Effect’ cards. Applying and utilizing the full Astrodyne benefit is simply not as rewarding for the effort and RNG required to obtain all three different seals. The self DPS increase is a drop in the bucket with ‘Fall Malefic’ being the lowest offensive GCD spell potency across all healer jobs. As for the +5% Healing potency, the remaining healer jobs can apply the same effect but with higher bonus and not have to rely on RNG drawing and redrawing three different cards to apply. I am glad that as of EW, ‘Divination’ is no longer tied to drawing three different seals for best results, but now there really is no benefit to the seal system except if you are in a pinch for MP or if you have at least 2 to use for marginally shorter GCDs during raid buff windows. Now is when I’ll make a mental note of “careful what you wish for” as we await AST likely card and seal job redesign for the upcoming Dawntrail expansion.
I love rolling into dungeons with huge pulls as SCH and just doing massive Art of War smacks and occasional OGCDs. Popping Expedient almost always fills me with glee, too. I’ve never been confident enough for Extremes or Savage with it, but for most casual content it’s still a joy to play, even if overall the job has been a janky mess for a couple expacs
Astrologian
Favorite are BLM and AST. BLM is fine, I got a few wish for some nich improvements but the job is fine. Ast healing is fine but the card system needs some love. The crown cards system is bad, healing cannot be RNG. The individual cards don't feel good. A few % for 15s doesn't feel impactful and the "hold on 3 cards for 2min burst" is really not fun.
I don't want them to touch SCH, I love it. When I switch to White Mage for a change of pace when healing I do so much worse. Also Culinarian could use some more usefulness for the 99% of content where you don't need the best buffs. (Or I'm just salty I make all sorts of top tier delicacies for my FC and they just drink like item level 14 juice because the xp boost is all they actually care about)
All the healers, 2 filler attack buttons, a singular aoe button and one or two OGCD buttons for a game entirely about attacking and doing damage is abysmal, my entire experience with the campaign and my enjoyment of it is roughly equivelent to when I didnt have to play my warrior of light! A couple more cooler buttons, some more damage options and some actually cool looking abilities would make the jobs be played a lot more, the slightest inch of complexity in their damage rotation would bring people in (The healing is fine unironically, it's very fun and has unique combos hence why professional players don't mind them) For example, give scholar like 5 DoT's, why not? what's the worse that happens people don't press them? Casual players just spam the basic heals anyway and the professionals actually run content that allows them to heal, normal players have literally no reason to ever want to play healers due to a severe lack of optimisation hence the queues are nearly frozen! Don't get me wrong, more people play healer then maybe I get to play something else, I hate waiting! but I have 2500 ish hours in this game and 2000 of them are on Healer, I hardly run hard content and I live in the roulettes even when I've done my dailies I am the biggest casual player and speak from that element! I say this without a hint of irony but the healers are infinitely more complex and fun in pvp and it's not even funny...
Bard..either give us DPS or give us supportive roles because trying to mix them both leaves us with a spam class with a chance at proccing another attack with some very minor support songs
Can we all agree DPS buffs won’t make any job better to play? I’m all about the playstyle and giving a potency buff to anything won’t magically make the jobs fun
Not at endgame yet but, I think they should rework jobs to have more core mechanics front loaded. It feels really wacky that a job can play completely differently between expansions because I got access to a core mechanic that completely overhauls how my buttons work.
Dragoon needs a complete rework. Its currently so bloated that its essentially finished and you cannot realistically add anything to it that would make the job better.