Lore-wise how do you explain your job's nerfs/inexplicable loss of skills/spells?

If all else fails, blame Shinryu.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

I know there's no basis for this in the lore (though some MMOs give tongue-in-cheek humorous lore reasons for rebalanbe patches), when your class gets buffed/nerfed or loses a skill from the expansion, how do you explain it?

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I don't. As far as I am concerned the game-mechanical abilities we have are at best an approximation to what the characters can/cannot do in-universe anyway.
So when then game designers change a job or class, that generally has no effect at all on what the lore says.

Despite wanting to keep my character's story as close to in game canon as possible, the continued changes to the ability system (mostly losing abilities and the scrapping of the cross class system, which do not seem to effect NPCs - NPC GLAs for instance are still seeing casting CNJ spells) mean I'm willing to evoke gameplay and story segregation here and have it that my character in character/story wise still uses scrapped 1.0 abilities like Red Lotus and War Drum, and can still cross class CNJ spells such as Cure, Esuna and Protect (and for that matter, even still use scrapped abilities and spells like MRD's Foresight and CNJ's Stoneskin), even though in game I'm no longer using them (because the game arbitrarily says I can't).

It doesn't harm the lore at all as ability changes are purely for gameplay and rarely fit into lore anyway, so it's a handwave I'm willing to accept in this case.

The abilities are just for gameplay reasons I reckon, I doubt anyone who actually fought using such a totally predictable rotation of moves would have made it to where my WoL is.

Interesting question. I haven't specifically wondered about it, but you've got me thinking now that you mentioned it.

My first thought would be that my WoL, a summoner, noticed quickly that, beyond Othard, his spells and egi weren't hitting as hard as they used to. It didn't take long to find out why: the concentrations and flow of aether were significantly lower than those of Eorzea.

Having identified the problem, he began to adjust his incantations, and experimented with ways to use the lower levels of aether more effectively. The very nature of his well-practised dreadwyrm trance had to be changed. His old routines (in martial-arts parlance, his "kata"), reliant on the wide-area disruption of enemy aether, were no longer mana-efficient. Instead, he focused his own aether into more intense and frequent applications of deathflare.

Smn Lv70 spoiler:

And the new knowledge revealed by Principia, allowed him to further manipulate his internal aether, and convert his egi into demi-Bahamut.

Hence his new "rotation". Some of Lyland's old spells became relatively weaker, but this was compensated with stronger bursts of flares, either from him or demi-Bahamut. More importantly, the new routine was just as effective outside of Eorzea as it was inside his native realm. And this was key to his overall effectiveness, wherever in the world he may be. ;)

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Originally Posted by Pomo

An evil wizard did it.

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The Lala's escaped the pentagram before the ritual was complete.

After numerous injuries to random citizens by stray bullets finally culminated in a noble taking a lead shot to the shoulder the Ishgardian government forbade the practice of machinists firing their weapons into the air. While they were at it they used their leverage to ban the use of grenades in combat and lower the number of bullets a firearm may contain at any given time. It is for these reasons that Joye left Ishgard, Steve planning to keep her out of sight until she can stop reflexively firing multiple rounds into the air every time she starts combat.

In order to compensate for these new rules and the sudden lack of cooperation with the lancer's and archer's guilds, Steve removed the safety device from the gauss barrel in order to allow the use of overheated bullets and improved the rate at which the aetherotransmitter manufactures wildfire pitch.

If I actually had to explain it to myself... Reality warping/teporal shifts, one minute it was there & the next it never was... you only think/know it was cause u have (as a mad scientist said once) a "Stiener" power, ie: "Echo", that allows you to remember reality as you origionally saw it & not how reality says you should have even if both are wildly different from another (alternate realities, world lines, etc.)

on a sub-note what we can do in-game & what we could do if FF14 was a real world with us stuck in it are totally different... I mean if we were in the "real" version nothing would stop us from mergiing any &/or all classes into 1 if we wanted

My THM used to use Physick, but as he grew more powerful he found it was too weak of a spell to suit his needs. He ended up ignoring it, and now isn't even aware it exists anymore, as if it was mysteriously wiped from his spellbook.

Keep em coming, I enjoy these