Quote Originally Posted by Aegrus View Post
Playing a tank is not the same as playing a healer. Playing Monk is not the same as playing Black Mage. I ask this because having a diverse point of view is important, especially when tanks and healers are often lynchpins of good groups.

If you want another specific example, the aforementioned Monk still has obvious issues with greased lightning, and prolonged phase shifts such as Living Liquid in A3. The phase transitions are so long, that it is quite easy to drop greased lightning, and they are designed around a ramp up to 3 stacks. Just the extra ~2sec of cast delay in it being applied at the start instead of the end of the animation alone makes a huge QoL difference in the class. This is something you wouldn't know unless you play or work with players who play monk often.

The bigger point of the OP was also that Dev experience is also not the end all, player feedback is really important.
They do respond to player feedback quite often. The WM/Gauss thing is a perfect example and acted upon quite quickly. The Dragoon positional tweeks too. As for the MNK, didn't the whole new meditation thing resolve much of the issues with phase transitions and GL? I haven't levelled my MNK to 60 yet so I don't know the mechanic.

As for the design thing, its likely a number of the devs do play support roles. More than that, any class will go through a lot of peer review by devs and rigorous testing by the QA constantly provide feedback. All the class changes have probably gone through many iterations before going live. Player feedback is valuable but often one set of feedback will contradict another and in some cases its an issue of people still adapting to new systems and encounters.

WoW is a really bad example. Hell we even had one of their devs say recently in an interview that it was a particular specs turn to be underpowered. There balance has often been a mess, let alone most of their class design.