crafting is gone

[Callinon]

I think the biggest problem is SE needed to do this a lot sooner like HW or SB and we are what 5 years in and finally they decided to clean up the crafting system, that's 5 years of ability bloat its bound to be a shock to the system seeing what looks like a gutting of skills being done.

Hopefully SE wont leave it so long the next time.

Honestly this. SB and ShB both saw significant ability pruning on combat classes, but there's never been any on crafting classes (unless you want to count the elemental abilities in ShB.. ok) and it's way WAY past time. If the different abilities actually mattered maybe it'd be ok to have 40 of them like we do right now, but most of the time one ability just obseletes another. But that's a thing we've been solving with combat classes for quite some time now.

FFXIV seems to be the only game in existence where most of its community think they can drive out hardcore players and turn it into a casual only game, lol.

You must not have played any other MMORPG... like ever. Because this is quite common in all of them.

Fun fact though: successful games are built on their casual audience, not the hardcores. Hardcore players are good to have around, don't get me wrong... it's good for the game that those players exist. But there aren't anywhere NEAR enough of them to sustain a product long term. Given that reality, skewing a game toward appealing to the casual player makes perfect sense.