Originally Posted by
Praesul
People complained incessantly about DRK and GNB openers being too busy, those players got exactly what they wanted. Personally I never had any issues with gapclosers dealing damage and was more than okay with all tanks keeping them that way but I knew they would be changed due to the massive amount of complaints. I am at least glad that WAR and PLD got to keep their offensive ones.
DRK and GNB being higher APM than the other two options is definitely a part of their identity and something that should be kept going forward, but I'm not sure what the devs could have done. The animations wouldn't make sense with 0 damage attached to them, so they needed to create new ones. If they wanted to make the openers less busy they could have added abilities used rotationally that CAN'T be used in the opener, something gated behind a resource maybe, but the issue with that is with how the game is so burst damage oriented people would just complain they have tools they can't use in their opener (see MNK and Phantom Rush). Then, if you could pool the resource for these hypothetical abilities to keep APM but (but again, NOT in the opener) people would just hold and use them in their re-opener and just exacerbate the issue.
Most of of the issue with job design can be laid at the feet of people that hyper obsesses over extreme optimization, because they are the only ones that care about small discrepencies that ultimately do not matter. They're the reason why we have the 2min meta, they're the reason why PLD lost Shield Swipe, DRK lost Reprisal and Low Blow procs, why Inner Release got changed to auto crit + dhit etc etc.