Quote Originally Posted by JCharms View Post
I take it you must be new to MMO's? Because i've seen this in every game i've played, and that's a lot.
Now I'm not saying its right, wrong or even indifferent to them doing this, but merely pointing out that as games mature, devs will squish stats and skills from time to time as part of long term planning.
Examples such as these have little to do with FFXIV as it currently stands.

You're right in that there are a wide variety of reasons why MMO developers might tweak skills, particularly in ways that decrease player power. For example, numbers might have gotten too large as a result of sh*tty and lazy development practices, so everything gets scaled down to manageable levels (including enemies). Or, perhaps, one or two classes are overly powerful, and therefore are brought back down to earth via a patch, rendering them less powerful than before.

Neither of these situations is remotely comparable to the 4.0 rework. SE has not expressed any desire to tone down overall numbers (and, indeed, based on videos, it looks like numbers will only grow larger in 4.0), nor is there any evidence that the community or SE thinks a particular class is overpowered, except perhaps Warrior and Astrologian. Coupled with the fact that there's a convenient level cap boost available to balance jobs via improving weaker ones rather than bringing down stronger ones, and we are left with my original statement: there is NO reason for SE to have weakened a level 60 job with the introduction of 4.0.

To make it even more absurd, even after the boost of 10 levels, we still have grey areas in regards to whether a job is improved. I challenge you to name a single title in which this has been the case. I've never seen a level cap increase associated with a drop in class power - ever (and yes, I've played a lot of games, including a lot of MMOs). In fact, I've never seen a level cap increase associated with even a roughly lateral set of abilities. They always come with clear-cut upgrades, albeit the upgrades often are not created equal across all classes.