"There wasn't much we could really do with SCH"

[Boizinho]

"We'd rather you didn't play Demonology Warlock" - Ion Hazzikostas 2015

I'm glad I'm not the only one getting this vibe from the Live Letter. It really does feel like "we'd rather you didn't play Scholar."

Also for those who didn't play WoW at the time, Demonology Warlock was in a great spot design-wise but they deliberately nerfed the absolute hell out of its potencies so that people wouldn't feel any attachment to it, because the very next expansion it got a lot of its kit gutted to make way for Demon Hunter, the new class that got a lot of Demonology's old flavor and came right out of the gate being OP as hell.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

[Deceptus]

I'm glad I'm not the only one getting this vibe from the Live Letter. It really does feel like "we'd rather you didn't play Scholar."

Also for those who didn't play WoW at the time, Demonology Warlock was in a great spot design-wise but they deliberately nerfed the absolute hell out of its potencies so that people wouldn't feel any attachment to it, because the very next expansion it got a lot of its kit gutted to make way for Demon Hunter, the new class that got a lot of Demonology's old flavor and came right out of the gate being OP as hell.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

Yep, that was about the time I checked out of WoW.

When the lead developer literally says "We" don't want "You" playing a certain spec. And yes, Demo was absolutely gutted so Demon Hunter could be made.

Here's the correlation to FFXIV.

The different jobs of FFXIV can easily be seen as job Specs from WoW.

You have a Tank "Job" and 4 different playstyles of it, well 2 honestly. Bursty (GNB / WAR) and Defensive (PLD / DRK)

They want to go the same way with Healers but they've massively screwed that up.

They want Regen / Shield but they're not doubling down enough on it. When the "Shield" healers have more Regens than actual Shields that's a massive design problem, proof the devs have zero idea what they're talking about or designing (IMHO).

[Irenia]

I don't exactly agree with the demo warlock comparison because if there is one thing I believe about this team, is that they want you to pick any standard job within a given role that appeals to you for whatever content and not feel like you are holding your team back.

Their problem is that the team doesn't make healers appealing to a large sector of veteran healers. Maybe they don't know how? Maybe there is a conflict with other design goals they deem more important? I don't know because they don't talk healing much...

[Punslinger]

I'm glad I'm not the only one getting this vibe from the Live Letter. It really does feel like "we'd rather you didn't play Scholar."

Also for those who didn't play WoW at the time, Demonology Warlock was in a great spot design-wise but they deliberately nerfed the absolute hell out of its potencies so that people wouldn't feel any attachment to it, because the very next expansion it got a lot of its kit gutted to make way for Demon Hunter, the new class that got a lot of Demonology's old flavor and came right out of the gate being OP as hell.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

This points to a disturbing trend I've seen in FF14's job design. The fewer expansions a job has been around for, the better a state it's in. New jobs are generally well-designed and have integrated kits that are fun to play, but lessons learned from designing those new jobs are not applied when updating the existing jobs. Older jobs get changes that break their mechanical identity (gun-mage and bow-mage in HW), or which gut the class fantasy (AST card rework in 5.0, sect loss in 6.0, and BRD losing songs), or which leave them in a clunky un-fun state (MCH during SB). SGE got what appears to be a DPS kit with more than two buttons, but nobody on the dev team figured out that maybe other healers should too?

Looking at ShB jobs, my biggest complaints about DNC and GNB are the lack of primal weapons for glamour (seriously, guys, you've had two damn years to add them in). For the SB jobs, SAM is okay, but the addition of Tsubame-gaeshi turned what was a relatively free-flowing rotation into a strict "don't drift by even a millisecond" rotation. RDM is still fun. Then the HW jobs have clearly suffered: MCH is okay now after being clunky for the first four years of its life, DRK continues to be turned into "WAR but emo," and AST is the friggin' Giving Tree with how much class lore and mechanical complexity it's given up. (3.0/4.0 cards = actual decision tree, even if you usually wanted Spread Balance. 5.0 cards = bland +damage buff, collect stickers. 6.0 cards = self-buff only.)

And then you have the ARR jobs. Some are okay, only because they're clearly mained by people on the dev team (*cough* BLM *cough*). Others are an absolute shambles. WHM and SCH most notably, but even NIN was so badly done in 5.0 that Square gave it an emergency rework in 5.1. Some of this is hopefully being fixed in 6.0, but the team's track record does not inspire confidence.