Quote Originally Posted by Nabby View Post
Disagree. As a DPS it is not enjoyable or engaging to have aggro management take up hotbar space instead of a more complex base rotation with more buttons. DPS still have plenty of damage mitigation abilities that are basically useless outside of high-end content and that's fine. We don't need every aspect of tanking to be a team effort. Especially not when the aggro management system also made it a fucking nightmare to play with strangers who refused to use their tools effectively or disagreed on who's responsibility it was to manage aggro. I don't need tanks refusing to take a damage hit and letting the DPS die, and I don't need healers greeding damage with cleric stance and letting the tank die.

SB also still had TP, which was also a pretty terrible system held over from an earlier design philosophy where complexity was put into the player toolkits rather than the encounters themselves, and it also restricts the design space for hard encounters because those tools are either essential (which means old encounters become broken and incomplete when job skills change, like in WoW) or non-essential which then makes them rather useless as skills unless they do more damage and kill the boss quicker.

In order to keep the game fresh with each new expansion and content release stuff has to change. Jobs have to change, but old encounters still need to work and provide some level of challenge at the appropriate level. If you design the encounter challenge around frankly niche skills the challenge doesn't last more than one expansion, as those niche skills get old the fastest, are removed and the encounters are rebalanced to allow brute-forcing mechanics. On the other hand, if you just shuffle around the ways Jobs do and mitigate damage they can still feel fresh each new expansion without breaking all the old fights.

In short, it's not about how easy or hard it was. SE isn't designing the game the way they do in order to make it easier for players. The difficulty is just shifted to the encounters themselves, because they're going to stay the same even when the next expansion comes out, while the Jobs will inevitably continue changing.
I mean it was pretty easy to manage aggro. Using DPS as a cooldown taught them to hit their 1 or 2 buttons every minute or so to drop aggro. Encounter difficulty hasn't really changed either. O12s was no easier than E12S.