If YOU Could Be A Developer For The Next Year...

Seems people forget that getting blu to this point takes a lot more work than having your friend cleave you to 99, then meleeing uragnites afk outside adoulin.
Blu needed to earn each of those abilities. They HAVE to farm spells. They HAVE to get 210 JP's. They HAVE to learn what spells to set and what to sacrifice for each target they fight. So no, WAR, SAMs, DRKs absolutely should not be as good as BLU. If SE wants to make them as good, then spread out 185 ??? all over vana'diel and have them fight NM's of various difficulty, each one rewarding +1 to STR DEX or VIT, but make the stat drop way less than 100%. Then we can call it even.
If not, I think the jobs are fine as they are, except mnk. SE just needs to buff Victory Smite and all is well with the world.

I don't think the strongest character should necessarily be the one with the most effort involved, especially in a MMO.

Learning spells is part of the BLU experience and not what should be used to justify it being stronger than everyone else.

Tell that to all the people who quit when Buramenk'ah came out and was stronger than their RME swords.

No need, they still lurk forums and say /its not worth it/ or something similar. Looking at you Mister Nirvana over there ^.-

To be fair class balance is completely different than gear balance. Your RME sword isn't a person competing for a slot in your main hand. It is an item, a tool that you have, that you can equip if it is useful to you.

But people with an Almace were were competing for a spot with people who had Bura.

But on a sidenote, I've been doing campaign battles for AN since i ran out of stones and still wanna kill Morta some. Went and did battles on blu, thf and melee rdm. but as i'm typing this, i decided to go mnk and man is it ever weak. all arguments aside, SE really needs to fix mnk. really.

Dude if we do this i deffo want PT loot.

I mean you could rotate ppl and finally make them lvl a job thats needed for the fight they want gear from instead of mercing Jov Body for them and on the next encounter with the poor guy you wonder why he only has 2 macros ^^ imo.

Last merc i talked to said: /wuteva, i just take the gils from the nubs/ - to prolly form his 20th REM for a job he only plays in Ambuscade -_-;

1) Remove Encumbrance all together.
The game made a design choice to put functional "levels" inside gear. They made an additional game design choice to have players swap gear for the use of different abilities, and to "react" (-dt gear etc). Taking away this stuff is just silly - if they want to prevent actions we already have things like Terror and Sleep that do not stop you from changing gear or functionally lowering your level. This was a super poor design choice, especially when we can't do it back to the enemies... Imagine if we could just level-down a 145 enemy to a level 99 mob (in-before well actually on the back-end the game has all mobs as 99 and...) by stealing it's weapon for a minute straight... It just needs to go.

2) Make "amnesia" readily curable via items we can use similar to echo drops.
They designed certain jobs (most notably, DNC) to be extremely dependent on job abilities for survival and performance, locking these abilities out hurts not only the job, but also others who depend on their survival (If they are fulfilling a healer role in the party, people will die with no way to stop it unless they are ignored and a secondary healer is used). I think amnesia as a debuff is fine to exist, just give players a way to react to it.

3) Make certain job-defining abilities / buffs un-despellable.
There are various abilities in the game that greatly change the mechanics of a given job. To continue on the DNC example, Fan Dance and Saber Dance are two such abilities. A sacrifice is already made to enable the 'modes' or 'stances' those job abilities provide, so so keeping them active full-time or nearly-full time doesn't really break the game and is completely viable on the vast majority of enemies. I largely view them as the "light arts" and "dark arts" of DNC. However, in game these are simply treated as 'buffs' that can't be dispelled, with very long cool-downs on the abilities that prevent their re-application. I'm sure there are a bunch more abilities like this others can think of, but my opinion is a certain handful of spells and abilities like this need to be either completely un-dispellable or have their cooldowns greatly shortened. I feel like S/E really dropped the ball on a lot of things like this.

4) Just increase the duration of buffs in general!
The never-ending constant re-application of buffs in this game, where buff-stacking is a fun mechanic and a great reward for leveling up and playing with others, is to the point of ridiculousness. Outside of super-long duration geared scholars using job abilities to extend duration, and some RDM self-buffs, everything is ultra short. The fact that so many spell buffs only last 30-60 seconds but so many fights can last 30 minutes is insane.

The problem I see with nerfs is that they're rarely on point. We're in a situation where people flock to BLU because they don't understand how to gear/play other melee jobs. That's a stupid reason to ask for a nerf. I'm not saying BLU isn't good, I just don't believe it's some kind of god tier melee job. Look at what happened with BLMs in the Bahamut II era. People were time nuking/sleeping and it was perceived as OP so we got a BLM nerf. Shortly afterwards people just ended up melee burning the fight, which was even faster/easier/more cheesy.

They don't understand how to gear/play blu either. Anyone who is really good at blu is good at other jobs too. Except mnk, that job really needs a lot of love.

I just really hate zoning - especially into Ambu - that ***takes ages to register gear :((((

The majority of BLUs I see are garbage. Same with PUPs. Just because a job CAN be good doesn't mean that it inherently is. The difference is that A LOT of good players who contribute information to the community DO play BLU because of it's strengths. Because of this, there is a metric shitton of information about BLU out there, and even a shitty player can download a lua, read what spells are good to set and spam CDC. Lots of BLUs do that. And it's good enough that they can get through a lot just doing that. They won't ever be top teir, but they can do a whole lot better than they would on a job like Dancer.

Buff is fine. Raise my salary not reduce it.

Your reasoning is when I come to a conversation, laugh and hope SE nerfs BLU to the ground.

This is an MMO, we are supposed to play together, and work around each jobs weaknesses to find up a strategy. BLU used to simply be a job that could adapt to a specific situation and be very good to have at it, which is perfectly fine and good to have (though not used often because you had to be really good to take on other jobs). With the advent of MG and the new gifts, now BLU is a one man army that can do almost everything on its own, *** the rest. Let me re-iterate, this is an MMO. There is no "one man army" in a balanced MMO.

BLU is basically the 2nd best job at every single thing in the game(STP, ACC, Attack, AOE damage, Defense, Magic Defense, blink tanking, etc.), and most jobs aren't even #1 at anything. This is going too far.

You do not get to say it deserves to be good because it runs around and learns some spells. No other job HAS that option. I would gladly run around and do a million stupid little things if it made my THF invincible and able to evade everything. I'm not exactly someone against the concept of work within an MMO, here let me show off:

Here's my thing: I run with a group of friends, one of which has decided to play BLU since he's generally a tank and sometimes an official tank isn't necessary. So on some things he goes BLU and I go THF. I massively outgear him, I have practically the ideal THF anyone could ever hope to imagine. He has some meh augments on some herc and regular adhemar. I can take 2k damage from an AOE, he will take 600 damage from it. I die, he survives. Just because BLU pops on Cocoon + MG + Barrier Tusk (such skill) he takes greatly reduced damage. I just confirmed if he tanks in a DT set, he does not. Now yes, Morimar is easy and dies usually in 15s, but if he resets TP then does his big AOE move other DD's are getting rocked and a BLU shrugs it off like nothing. This is just an example that's a similar principle that applies to almost all content in the game.

BLU can even completely shrug off the Intense Ambuscade Gigas Muzzling wallop from what I have read as well. It doesn't simply have an advantage in content, it has an ANSWER to all content. This is a step above what can ever be considered balanced.

Does BLU take some work to learn spells? Sure, but if that's what allows the job to be so OP I want my version of it so I can do the same. If that's not an option then one job should not get that advantage over all the others, because that's not balance.

BLU 2 stronk prz buf DNC

My main fear is that se will ruin blu like they did mnk. That's why I don't want a nerf. I've said just that in my other posts. Don't come in 3/4 of the way through the conversation and judge me off 1 post.
I don't just play Blu. My 3 main are Blu pld and whm, I also rather enjoy thf and blm. I'm flexible and if Blu were nerfed, I could still get stuff done. I'm just worried that if se makes adjustments, they'll ruin it. It's a sentimental thing. I've played and loved blu for years.
But also, as someone who's levelled and geared several jobs, I do believe blu has the right to be on top. Come on, SOMEONE will be on top, so why not the one that takes most effort? If they decide to reduce the gap a little, I can understand. But they cannot change the 1200 gift. No one can take back gifts. That would be dishonest.

I like BLU with AoE Mighty Guard for Ambuscade and stuff. Mighty Guard's Haste means we need one fewer buffer (it's roughly equivalent to a 2 song bard, after all). Something like GEO, BLU, DNC, PLD, COR, WHM can kill pretty much every Ambuscade they've released so far, iirc.

Some parse comparably to my Dancer, but most don't. The recent monster evasion nerf helped them compete in VD fights.

Gonna try to talk reason with you.

Worker A makes 80k. Worker B makes 60k. Does nerfing worker A salary down to 60k Better or does raising worker B salary to 80k better?

Your analogy is stupid because DPS isn't a currency.

For instance, if every event in the game can be beat with $60k, then is nerfing Worker A's salary down to $60k better or is raising Worker B's salary to $80k better?

Not sure why you are comparing THF to BLU in survivability? BLU is and always has been a hybrid job. The same would apply if you brought a RDM along. DNC is probably the best DD in the game as it stands, but no one says anything because less people play it because... well it is Dancer

The amount of BLU salt generated from a single sentence is hilarious, tbh.

Really does make it seem like most BLUs are playing the job for that special snowflake status.

Are you 100% sure you didn't take hate? Remember the new mechanic in ambuscade where the target receives more damage from aoe's that the other players. Maybe since you out gear him, you were the target of that move.

The situation he mentioned was in Sinister Reign against Morimar. We don't use BLUs in our VD Intense runs and have no issues with it whatsoever. Barfira is wonderful.

I'm with ya on this in spirit, but a lot of people simply don't care if they're of use and will just whine to get in the content anyway. I've seen lots of complaints about how unfair HP scaling is.

Sucks when 5/12 are contributing more HP to the boss than they are to the efficiency of the kill.

On that note, I'd make it so that acquired loot could be traded to people who participated in the kill for a fixed duration. Sucks to see someone get a +1 from a UNM coffer that they're not interested in, but only there to help someone else at least get the NQ.

Sorry, I misread. Thought the aoe mentioned was from gigas.

No problem! Misreads happen all the time. ;D

If they were at least within the same realm I'd have no problem with BLU having an advantage. But there's a huge difference between "Can actively tank content" and "gets one shot by content while not tanking". And while I mention THF specifically as it's what I'm on, any of the light armor DD's that aren't BLU have roughly the same defense and will take the same damage.

I mean, you could sub /blu for cocoon as well lol. Unless the 15 STP and sekka will break your dps

If you read his post he only talked about defensive abilities. Blu can stack high defense without sacrificing any offensive abilities, while other dps, such as dnc, war, sam has defensive abilities but using them will sacrifice their offensive abilities.

I believe most people here are well aware other dps can compete in terms of.... dps. If FFXI is all about 1 dps hitting a wall without considering SC and and support then yeah, other dps can compete. But it's a lot more than that.

I normally /RUN for magic defense, vallation, 58 resist of whatever element, en-damage, etc. I was /sam because I was farming Selkitt and /RUN really isn't applicable there.