u/Feplyss

P. Mastery is the buff that you get once you level a P. Job. It's a 2% buff per job, totaling 48% if you leveled all 24. That is a massive damage increase, not something you can simply ignore. This is clearly meant as a way to reward players for trying out and "mastering" multiple P. Jobs, but it ends up being an issue IMO.

The P. Job system in general is deeply flawed. While I do prefer them not being consumable over Logos and Lost Actions, they're much less flexible, and most of them will not complement your Job's kit very well. That means that you have to try them out to find one that fits yours playstyle and feels fun to play. Or you just get which one is stronger, your choice.

However, it ends up contradicting the P. Mastery benefit. As you're incentivized to level many P. Jobs, most of the time you'll be using ones that don't really add much to your gameplay.

That gets even worse if you're a DPS. Unlike Tanks and Healers, DPSs do not have many survivability tools, specially Casters, who lack both Bloodbath and Second Wind. Therefore, they need survavibility tools from P. Jobs, but that has 3 problems:

• As you're incentivized to level multiple jobs, most of the time you'll be playing with an incomplete toolkit, which means you won't always have a survivability tool available;
• If you're leveling an offensive job, which usually offer less survivability, you will need a Healer. However, since the survivability issue incentivizes playing Tanks, it's common to find parties without a single Healer;
• Some P. Jobs will give you mits instead of heals, which while helpful, will not always allow you to survive through raidwides, even without any Vulnerability stacks. Some bosses simply have too many raidwides, and sometimes CEs will take too long due to the lack of damage, either because many DPS are dead, or because a lot of players will opt out of playing DPS.

Overall, P. Mastery is, to me, one of the worst things in Occult Crescent. It incentivises you to play P. Jobs who don't fit your playstyle, punishes Jobs who require certain tools, and is way too strong for one to skip.

It can be either something unnecessarily confusing like Midnight Motorist, or an out of game decision like the whole Security Breach thing with Scott not telling Steel Wool the whole story.

To me it's the lack of clarification of what's canon and what's not, leading to what in my opinion are boring and repetitive debates over "X material is canon, Y material is not", which almost always end up with everyone going home with their original beliefs unchanged.

I might be wrong, but from what I've seen, it's kind of a community consensus that ITP happens in one way, shape or form. That's probably due to the fact that it has been done thrice.

But like, what if it simply isn't? I've never seen something important coming from it, other than minor details like hints and dates, which can come from any book story independently of its canonicity.

So like, I know that some debates are done for the sake of the debate itself, and I'm good with that. But other than that, what actually changes if ITP is or isn't canon to the mainline lore?