Quote Originally Posted by KalinOrthos View Post
With that said, completely changing the way a class plays the closer they get to the level cap is too far a swing in the opposite direction. Instead of making the class feel stale, it ends up being completely different from what you started out with. For some, that's fine, but it makes new player experiences even more difficult because you have to forget everything you spend 80 levels learning. There's a balance; abilities like Nascent Chaos, Blasting Zone, and Edge/Flood of Shadow have their place in giving the raw damage increases, but it also has to come with new, useful tools and toys to play with.
Any examples you can give of where changes were made on the right side of that line and where they were made on the wrong side?

For instance, I see Fire II's eventual complete obsoletion and Aspect Mastery (which invalidates the MP margins we'd been used to accounting for previously) as each belonging to the wrong side, even if I may prefer their resultant gameplay. That doesn't mean I find Flare spam to the exclusion of Fire II necessarily bad, to be clear. I just dislike how it amputates a previous understanding of how to optimize the job just for increased power elsewhere, especially since it didn't have to remove and resultantly simplify gameplay. It particularly annoys me when the one (e.g. Flare spam) completely replaces the other (at least situational Fire II), much like a direct upgrade, without doesn't go so far as to admit that the old gameplay is dead and gone.

On the other hand, Mirage Dive even just in terms of its potency (i.e. as a direct upgrade to Jump and Spineshatter Dive) seemed to draw a new theme for SB DRG -- deliberate macrorotational timing. If not for the 15 second window it granted us to bank for Blood for Blood, I likely would have thought it pure bloat, but that window brought DRG into a new perspective, a new or deepened theme of optimizations. Geirskogul-->Nostrond, especially before its simplification, likewise returned at least some usefulness to Blood of the Dragon and something to capstone rotation, rather than being just another (compound) CD to throw into the mix. Those each seemed well-designed upgrades; they ushered in a new stage of play for the job without invalidating (in 4.x Nostrond's case, specifically returning) previous means of optimization.