A (maybe) different outlook on the current DRK situation

[OdinelStarrei]

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

The Good:snip snip

Regarding Quietus - I have to disagree here. Quietus was never a waste of a button, in either SB or ShB. In SB, Quietus was the only reason we were able to upkeep the permanent Abyssal Drain spam. If you'd look back to those old tooltips, AD would only heal in significant portions if it was combined with DA, and you would only be able to have infinite spam if you used Quietus, since the MP regen from BW would work on Quietus per enemy hit. This is how you went from 0 MP to max MP in a single GCD in big pulls. This also served to make it markedly unique from Decimate, something that current Quietus does not do very well. In Shadowbringers, Quietus regen was nerfed, but is still a useful button. This is not only because it's a innate 60 potency gain over Stalwart Soul(can't remember if this was different in ShB itself), but because it doesn't need the prereq hit of Unleash.

You can't compare a combination of both a GCD and a oGCD, particularly one that costs resources, to a single GCD that mainly focuses on preventing gauge overcap. This is like if you said Souleater + EoS is stronger than Bloodspiller, therefore making Bloodspiller not worth using. You need a gauge dump in AoE that isn't LS, or it's a objective potency loss that scales up with more targets. And if your concern is Stalwart Soul provides both MP and Blood in a single GCD, consider that Quietus under Delirium, a cooldown that we are going to have every dungeon pull, will regenerate 500 MP compared to the standard 200 MP like Bloodspiller. With BW and passsive MP regen, that leads to around 1300~ MP per GCD, MP ticks skewing that a bit. Instead of looking at Delirium as "no cost gauge spenders" you could also think of it as "150 free Blood that I can't use on Living Shadow". Not perfect, I know. That enough justifies Quietus existence. I'm also surprised that you didn't mention that Unleash and Stalwart Soul are spells, and therefore are locked to 2.5 GCDs, making BW impossible to get the 5 hit with only their usage, and making SkS a dead stat for 2/3 of our AoE GCDs. That's a design issue, that's pretty awful.

Regarding Salted Earth and Blood Weapon -
There is a huge misconception about what happened with Salted Earth. SB Salted Earth is arguably the best version of Salted Earth to exist. With a cooldown of 45 seconds, decent potency, and passive Blood gauge accumulation(this is the best part), Salted Earth was a multi-purpose DoT that seriously syngerized well in the kit. Back in the day, while Salted was clunky with a <me> macro, it was still critical. When Shadowbringers rolled around, doubled the cooldown, removed the blood interaction, and took all of it's potency and moved it into I assume Living Shadow, there was a justifiable cry to delete the skill because it was almost button bloat. And I'm someone who actually defends the ability to move Salted Earth. Being able to place Salted Earth AHEAD of you and the boss you are moving made a lot of situations much easier to handle. Off the top of my head right now, I'm thinking of CC/BJ in TEA, Nael in UCOB right before divebombs, E8S after Mirrors, E7S add phase, E12S after certain Apocalypse casts, and I'm sure way more from HW (A7S) or SB (O8S trines, maybe O3S add cluster?) that I'm forgetting. The only thing Salt and Darkness is doing after they butchered Salted Earth in ShB is making the potency so high that it essentially equalizes to the damage we had in SB while being less interesting to use.

And frankly, if someone delayed the usage of Blood Weapon to match with Delirium, they didn't understand the tooltip. Blood Weapon is not a linear damage increase, it is a gauge accumulator and nothing more. If you didn't hold No Mercy to line up with Bloodfest, why would you hold Blood Weapon to line up with Delirium? Would MNKs in ShB hold Brotherhood to always line up with Riddle of Fire? Both being at a significant cost of usages to the skill per encounter? That is a skill issue, that's is a SE doesn't teach people how to play their own game issue, and not a design issue. The ease of use of a skill should never have any relationship to the number of actual usages the skill gets in content. That shouldn't be the case in general for anything, outside of fringe situations like the relationship we have with charged actions like Shadowbringer in certain killtimes or holding resources/CDs for cleave damage/phase pushing. Even now, you can't have BW and Delirium line up on the 1st usage, because of the mandate to have LS up by the 3rd GCD. They line up later (kinda) if you do an intentional 2-3 GCD delay, but that's obviously counter intuitive.

Regarding other skills and burst - No matter what version of the job we were in, the only button I would ever say was totally unused on DRK was Blood Price and maybe Unleash in HW/SB once you got good enough. And even then, if the DRK was pulling in a raid with no NIN, Blood Price would be used once pre-pull, disregarding anytime we would be forced into Grit during prog/emergencies. Everything on DRK was used within reason. And speaking of NINs, we always were a 1min/2min bursting job. That's what DRK is, an MP pooling job. All optimization breaks down to is, how many DA+SE/DA+anything/EoS+BS can we fit into raid buffs? That's always been the question, and how we arrived at our answer was different per expansion. This time around, in response to "feedback" we have had all the choice removed from us by making the MP regen 12K consistently, leading to only 4 MP spenders, and in EW specifically, a minimum of 3-4 Blood spenders after Delirium was changed. Our burst window was always reliable, but you had to actively set it up, much like how a NIN sets up Trick Attack 15-20 seconds in advance, we went in a different direction, by intentionally staying at near cap juggling MP regen before bursting all of it out at once. We do the same thing now, but the agency and failure state ranges from significantly reduced to no longer exists on DRK with the MP regeneration being as slow as it is, EW supplemented that by buffing LS to a frankly absurd level, and the addition of Shadowbringer. We essentially traded the ability to be invincible from SB into having one of, if not the biggest and easiest single target/AoE burst in the entire game.

And to double down on that, what even is a reliable burst window in FFXIV? It's in the 1 min. It's CERTAINLY on the 2min with the way buffs are. The game has been pigeonholed thoroughly in that regard. DRK is now the epitome of that. So much that I'd actually say our sustain damage is absolute trash. Take a look at this graph.



As you can see, this isn't sustained at all. These are SUBSTANTIAL peaks with a middling sustain. The sustain has to be bad, otherwise DRK would be doing more damage that Ranged DPS jobs. DRK is not versatile. It doesn't heal itself very well. It adapts poorly in emergencies. It doesn't have interesting game mechanics. TBN is controversial at best. It has one undeniable trick. And that trick is huge damage in raid buffs.

The Bad: snip snip

I have to agree, even if I don't really care about sustain on DRK anymore, because there simply isn't enough damage for me to care. But even with that said, the additions we got for the expansion on the mitigation end have been incredibly underwhelming. Oblation is far too weak for an 82 skill. Now that we are relatively high geared, I can safely ignore Oblation, and no one except for me, the person who goes over VoDs and designs the entire tank/DPS section of our mitigation timeline would probably notice anything different. The removal of Abyssal Drain GCDs, the removal of Sole Survivor, the removal Blood Price for the casual player, and for those things to be replaced with nothing, or really underwhelming alternatives (like buffing TBN from 20% to 25% in ShB, like what are you doing) just really annoys me.

I'm not going to go into Living Dead. Living Dead alone proves to me there's some crucial logic behind the relationship between tanks and healers is totally missing in the development room. It's not even worth talking about in length.

I take issue with part, though.

But as any good Scholar (and now Sage) knows, Shields are only as relevant as your ability to heal before the shield breaks.

That's not true. Shields are relevant because they zero out damage and because they don't have a deprecating effect when you stack them like mitigation. If anything, mitigation combined with shields makes the shields stronger by extension, since the shield itself is being drained slower. This was probably the justification for making Oblation as trash as it is. The ability to heal before shields doesn't matter if you've gotten enough percentage mitigation to survive regardless, and when that's not an option, the massive amount of SGE regens are crazy, and Zoe+Pnuema is a great burst heal. With two healers, even a SCH co-heal, it's even less of a problem. Anyone who was progging Firestorms of Asphodelos or Decollation with only full HP and shields will testify about how dead you are if you try that. It doesn't even need to go that far either, in big pulls in dungeons, TBN can work just fine, but it needs to have mitigation paired with it to make it worthwhile, or it's just going to break instantly and leave you with nothing. In fact, as someone who plays SCH/SGE as my primary healers, I made a post specifically about the SGE+DRK relationship. I've already typed up a storm, so please forgive me for regurgitating something I said about SGE specifically in a different topic.

SGE
I'm pretty sure a good SGE and a good DRK combination is absolutely busted. You get the DRK damage, you get the SGE damage, and you get the sturdiest TBNs. With the massive amount of oGCD, self-reapplying shields SGE brings, things like Kerachole, Holos, and Taurochole combine with Oblation, all of those oGCDs having short recasts that further amplify Haima, Panhaima, and TBN. The only thing I would ever have to alternate between pulls were Panhaima and Haima, everything else was easily handled by these other incredibly powerful oGCDs, with me spamming AoE the entire time, applying Soteria once the Panhaima/Haima shields fell off. Even on first pull where I would use the weaker Panhaima, it was more than made up for by a Krasis+Physis II and Zoe+Pneuma combo once I let the DRK get a little bit low after I had used the initial suite of damage mitigation. It's not like I needed weave slots, or that any of these had particularly long cooldowns. SGE is a true maverick in this department, and I not only performed the best using it, I had the most fun working together with general tank mitigation for mutual benefit. Seriously, this comp is brutally good if both players are playing at their peaks, I cannot recommend it enough.

You know what the problem is? I had to use my entire kit on all healers to heal a DRK in a way I thought was comfortable for both sides. Since I'm of the mindset, "Perfect practice makes perfect" I would play dungeon pulls like I'd be in an extreme trial or something. Use your entire kit, ABC, space out mitigation properly, do as much damage as possible, eat food (since it's so easy to make now/EXP), etc etc etc. This was MANDATORY. The same thing was demanded of the DRK, even when I play it. Reprisal, AL, doing actual damage, the works. It was actually quite enjoyable and easy when I found the right tank.

But when I healed the other tanks? I still did all those things, but it didn't feel nearly as needed, and if the DPS were slacking, as long as the tank pressed even a handful of mitigations, I don't think I'd be any the wiser. The high skill floor for basic adequacy on dungeon DRKing is not conducive to players who are not willing to put forth the effort to not be at a bare minimum competent in their dungeons on each party slot. If you get a Cure Iing WHM, or a Diagnosis-only SGE, or a single-targeting anything, you as a DRK are going to die, painfully, there is nothing you can do about it. Just take the penalty, it will be a lot less annoying. (Addendum, the other way around is also applicable, a TBN only DRK with no CDs or a kitchen sinking one who can't spread CDs properly is similarly a disaster.)

When I had good DRKs, DRKs that would play like I would in dungeons, it was easier to heal them than all of these bandwagoning WARs who think that 1 Bloodwhetting is the only CD they need to press in an entire dungeon pull. For the casual player who doesn't press all of their buttons, healing DRKs or tanking as a DRK must be an absolute nightmare, which would explain the discrepancy in experiences. I've never had any problems healing DRKs or being healed as DRK if both parties were capable of playing at even an acceptable level. But you need all parts of the team to be doing that to really get the most out of it in dungeons, while other tanks are running around soloing things all day, carrying people with literally nothing inside of their skulls, no problem.

So that once leaves us with the tried and true DRK problem that we are all familiar with. Noticeably more effort for the same overall result as other jobs in the role, now extended to the entire light party. I don't really care if they adjust this, since I like being challenged, I'm just pointing out what I've observed now that all my tanks and healers are at 90. BiS DRK is going to shred Smileton and Sigma pulls to pieces though. With damage CDs, I'm already slicing some packs down in less than twenty-five seconds with a decent group, the damage is already pretty obscene with a i600 greatsword. I'm not justifying this, I'm just saying Living Shadow and two Shadowbringers/SaD/Floods are enhanced multi-enemy deletion devices.

The Suggestions:snip sip

No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage. However, if I may make a suggestion of my own, maybe bring back Dark Dance and have it share a cooldown with Dark Mind? Or maybe just make more magic-attacking mobs in big pulls? I'm sure someone will question," Why isn't Dark Mind all damage reduction?" (addendum: Actually, can you just make magic damage actually visible to the player. Did you know Shining Cells is magic, while Warden's Wrath is physical? WHY?)

You know what needs to be fixed? The developers should actually talk about what they want DRK to be, and ask for people who actually have an inkling how DRK is, and was played for feedback to make a version that doesn't cause everyone to hate each other and the job they are playing. These suggestions are all things that are no-brainers. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to ask for your own invulnerability skill to not kill you. You shouldn't have to be "educated" to know that deleting entire sections of a job kit and replacing them with nothing is ridiculous. You should have to be "educated" to know that Blood Weapon should be on the stack system.

This is a unjustifiable botch job, plain and simple. We are STILL in Shadowbringers, a version of the job a lot of people were not happy with because of what it did to the systems, even if you liked it, what we had was so much better. And it needed tweaking, it needed adjustments, but it didn't need to be deleted for worse, less interesting systems in Shadowbrigners. And I started to like ShB DRK by 5.5! For the systems to remain in this abysmal state in Endwalker is a complete failure of the game design, regardless of the fact that we are META tanks right now. We're more than viable, we're on the top. We're the top dogs in a way we never were during SB or ShB. Almost HW level. But the design is so infuriating, there is no joy in being at the top. There's only frustration from the players and silence from the developers.

And that's the true failure of DRK. A landmark example of the total disconnect we've been struggling against for years, in it's peak form. Shattering the playerbase's faith in the job design as a result.

[DoppelShifter]

Oh boy, you certainly have a long one. As a note, you can always post a comment with sub-3k words, and then edit it, and put in the rest of your comment afterwards. Like how I'm going to do with this response. I'll do it piece by piece if I find something objectionable, as you did. If what I'm saying is insufficient, I can provide elaboration if required, I'm just a stupid DRK player. I apologize if this seems nitpicky.

I know about that workaround, but the end result tends to be a huge wall of text that often scares away all but the most dedicated, and frankly it ends up being an accessibility issue for a lot of non-neurotypical people. Thus why I prefer the topic breakdowns and post breakdowns, even if the excuse is kinda weak.

(Also I'm a game designer by craft; writing a lot and trying to make it readable kinda becomes a constant habit)

And oh, don't worry, we're just two different kinds of DRK player. You're a Savage raider (probably in a static, I assume) who uses parsers to optimize every tidbit of your rotation. I'm a more casual player that sometimes does Savage content with friends, and never ever touches a parser because I've been a WoW player (that started playing during Cataclysm, experienced all content there was at the time, and just jumped ship months before Pandaria hit, never really looking back) and I know the toxic hellhole that comes with obsessing with Recount.

Re: The Good, Regarding Quietus et al [snip snip]

See, this is an example of what I said above. At the level I experience the game (I rotate between all 4 tanks, with DRK being the most fun for me), that being mostly roulette content and the occasional Extreme/Savage with friends when they're on a break from their static, that's where I bump into the issues you mentioned; not necessarily the lack of raw damage, but "somebody somewhere in the balancing team ran the numbers and found out that this is the damage potential of DRK -- except it'll only be experienced in Savage by spherical chickens in a vacuum", and the tooltips aren't exactly intuitive in pointing towards that direction.

That's why I'll take your word for it and just point out that it's not what's perceived by me in the level of content I run, by reasons you already explained yourself.

Re: The Bad [snip snip] The shield part

Hmmmmm that depends, and I think we're seeing it from different angles.

You're looking at the question from a Tank + Healer pairing, and that's fair, I agree with all of your points.

But my point was from the PoV of a tank, relying on her own skills. Because, say, the healer screwed up and died, or because they don't have enough healing output to balance out the incoming damage even with all mitigations on (....the fact some Sages I've encountered seem to expect me to have ALL mitigations on at ALL times instead of spreading them over the course of the very long Endwalker pulls is a whoooooole different can of worms).

From that point of view, it becomes a very simple matter: your only "reliable" source of healing is yourself. You pop your mitigations and your TBN. ...And now what? Granted, you won't take real HP damage for a long time, and during that time your Souleater will heal a few chips of health, and maybe you'll sacrifice single-target damage from Carve to use Abyssal Drain to get a tiny bit more health, but.... Then what? The shield will be gone and your overall HP delta was still negative. Unlike PLDs, WARs and GLDs that can heal far more than they shield, your humongous TBN shield only delays your inevitable death.

And that's the gripe I have with this particular shield-to-healing ratio.

As for your quoted post on DRK x Sage and the experience of trying to put effort vs playing very casually, that very much lines up with my experience, yes. To the point that one of the Sages that let me die in [First lvl90 dungeon, spoilerydoo] recently told me "Yeah, I'm way too used to healing Warriors that basically heal themselves".

And like... I don't tend to bring food for Roulettes or anything, but I do gear up and overmeld as if I were preparing to Savage, and I do try to use my defensive kit to the fullest, so I should be no slouch to any competent healer.
...And yet, almost every time I die, it's because a Sage expected me to just TBN everything to the face without taking damage, and their burst wasn't enough to prevent me from dying.

No Dark Mind fix? Guess that means you actually understand what it's used for then, and I don't need to go into how useful Dark Mind is in savage.

Yeah, actually I transitioned from PLD to DRK back in 3.1~3.3 when I was trying some Savage runs with friends, and a friend from a static mentored me into the basics of DRK. So I learned pretty fast about how important Dark Mind was for surviving mechanics (specially since TBN didn't exist back then to wallpaper over the role with less skill required).

As for Dark Dance, well, only if they reworked it for the new damage model (as that was a regalia from the Parry days), and that would demand a new button to the bar, so I doubt it.

And I don't even ask for the classic "Wah, Dark Mind should apply to everything". We have plenty universal damage mitigation already. I just ask them to keep improving the QoL stuff that visually differentiates kinds of damage (like we have visual markers for tankbusters, penetrating tankbusters, stacks, numbered stacks, individual stacking, area buster, etc etc). Some people do catch up pretty quickly what kinds of damage are magical and which ones are physical (some are indeed obvious by context), but having some kind of color coding on the casting bar or something more explicit on the battle log would be nice.

At least that would make people whine less about Dark Mind and Dark Missionary.

And lastly, yes, I do agree that we need more direct information on the direction they want for jobs/classes. And I do mean in general. I could write an essay on how bad it felt to play 6.0 Astrologian when compared to back when I played it in 3.0. I could summarize it as "Trying to play with a Texas Instruments calculator with RNG issues" but that's a looooot of simplification on the table.

But what I think they want for DRK, by comparing it from 3.0 to 6.0 DRK, is a "tank that can feel like a DPS on-demand, but by spending limited resources". Back in 3.0 this manifested as having to pop Dark Arts to empower stuff. Nowadays this manifests as weaving Shadowbringer/Flood/Edge. A lot has changed and I know a fair share of people who miss the 3.0 "complex mana-and-TP-management when-should-I-DA" Dark Knight of old times, while I particularly appreciate the flawed-yet-seemingly-well-meaning streamlined version we have now.

I just think they haven't hit the mark yet, and they could at least make the class far more comfortable with VERY PUNCTUAL changes. But so far, we'll have to wait. And as someone who knows how hectic things are on the behind-the-scenes of game development and production, this is not mere laziness or even pride or people just sitting on their asses. If I could risk a guess, I'd say it's akin to what happened to WAR between 2.0 and 3.0: keep it functional, test a few things here and there, but our hands are too full for a proper rework right now, so until the next window of opportunity, this will have to do.

[OdinelStarrei]

A response! I love this, let's continue this discussion.

(Also I'm a game designer by craft; writing a lot and trying to make it readable kinda becomes a constant habit)

And oh, don't worry, we're just two different kinds of DRK player...

I'm a bit of a software lad myself, nothing professional though, big respect for the stuff you put yourself through.
Yeah, we are two different types of player coming to a similar conclusion that our job is unsatisfactory. That's the exact opposite of what SE intends when they do reworks. Usually, your side of the fence gets what's needed to lower the skill floor to an acceptable point for entry, and my side gets to keep a diminished, but still observable skill ceiling, with mastery being a goal with equivalent results. DRK is unique in that it fails at both of these things. Compare this to WHM, where casually, it's A-OK, super solid. Under mastery, the entire MP economy of the job falls apart. Compare this to AST, as you've stated where casually, it's an actual nightmare, there are so many buttons and bloat over the job with a card system that changes all over the place per expansion, but under mastery, some of the highest skill expression any job can have in the entire game.

We have angry casual players, both the DRK and the pug group, and angry hardcore players, both the DRK and the static. Confused newcomers and unsatisfied veterans. People straight ask me if they're griefing if they are playing DRK. How is that even something that happens in this game? That's not good when ALL SIDES can universally come to a consensus that something is badly designed when our goals are so diametrically opposed most of the time.

Hmmmmm that depends, and I think we're seeing it from different angles...

And that's the gripe I have with this particular shield-to-healing ratio....

I certainly agree here. I am definitely seeing it as a healer-tank relationship, or more specifically rather how the base of the holy trinitiy in tanks/heals support the peak of the triangle, the DPS. If you are a tank, and your entire team is dead on a boss with 60% left, is it really suitable design for the one tank to solo the entire boss? Is there something wrong with an negative HP delta on tanks? I feel that tanks are that are not DRK are starting to seriously erode away healer agency both in casual and hardcore content(once it's on farm.) There is sub 1 month period of time every content release where healers can really flex their kits before gear creep and experience make the entire role trivial to it's own playerbase, but with how absolutely invincible tanks are with their sustains, and how non-punishing any damage intake is, I feel healers are being made increasingly irrelevant in their primary objective (healing). This is seriously evident on WHM, who doesn't have mechanics to distract from the nuke spam. Right now, it feels like tanks that are not DRK, especially WAR, are fulfilling all parts of the trinity at the same time, which doesn't feel right to me. I don't want to advocate for nerfs, those don't feel good at all, but something isn't right here. I could be wrong on this bit, and it might be too big of a issue for any single post to handle.

And I honestly think they aren't designing some things in a total vacuum. Things like Death's Toll were definitely designed in direct opposition to skills like Macrocosmos. Intemperances happen during 2 mins. Limit Cuts happen right before a pot window. Act 2 ends right on the two minutes as everyone comes in for raid buffs. DRK's damage is certainly scaled to utilize the team's damage increases, otherwise there would have been no reason to change the cooldown of things like Blood Weapon from 40s to 60s, Delirium from 80s to 90s, even if the design of those skills were different. Just, somethings don't seem to be thoroughly thought through before implementation, like Oblation. Or the quintuple-down that is Living Dead. It's feels like, the person who is designing DRK itself is given a note about what the team is trying to do overall this expansion with jobs, the damage dealt by players and mobs is, and then got shut in the Square Enix server basement where he can get consistent 5 hit Blood Weapons, and everything he did was implemented into live versions of the game with no oversight. That obviously isn't what happened, but that means that multiple people had to sign off on the Spell Speed thing, Living Dead, Blood Weapon, etc etc. Which is honestly worse.

But what I think they want for DRK, by comparing it from 3.0 to 6.0 DRK...

I just think they haven't hit the mark yet...

I think that's a significant part of why things are so tumultuous. I think a lot of us are tired of them trying to hit the mark while simultaneously wearing earplugs and a blindfold. As I said before, I firmly believe that we need a conversation. We're chalking in at almost six years of questionable design choices of varying severity and 3 vastly different versions of the same job. An open letter, a community representative, someone to say "Yeah, this is under review." We haven't had that for a really long time, so people are getting out of control, which just perpetuates this non-stop negative feedback loop, emboldened by soundbites and really awful play experiences. Players should not have the responsibility of designing jobs or fixing very obvious mistakes when you have the design documentation, the feedback, the data and a test environment right there as the staff. I know there are people who can do this job justice. And if you can't get to it right now, let us know. Just tell us, and we're going to understand, we dealt with delays/cancellations for ultimate, delays for Eureka, delays for Endwalker itself, I'm sure we can handle a "We're working on DRK, give us until 6.3." We need something from them soon. Otherwise, we're just going to continue this death spiral, until people leave the job/game, or just continue to make themselves very visibly miserable because they have stockholm syndrome for greatswords and dark magic. I don't think I can deal with another one of my strats getting ruined because Living Dead makes it significantly harder to execute or having xivanalysis yell at me for the billionth time about a missed BW hit because I had to unmend once with that stupid 2.5 GCD.

[DoppelShifter]

A response! I love this, let's continue this discussion.

[Snip snip]

This time I won't do a point-by-point to your post (not out of disrespect, but for the sake of simplicity) because most of it boils down to some frequent points that sadly seem to be exceedingly common here in the forums.

Actually, coming here to the forums after all these years (last time I came here was during the 2nd month after Stormblood, when Square Enix hiked the sub prices in some countries, and I was among the affected, after they tripled my sub and I came to the forums to start a peaceful protest thread. I got a forum ban, and never came back) finally reminded me of some of the reasons why I don't really like to interact here very much.

But back to the subject in hand, I want to use a word you brought to the table: "communication".

Communication in the way you seem to want to happen is, frankly, impossible considering the scale of this game, this player base, and more importantly, its diversity.
Diversity of playstyles, diversity of platforms, diversity of focus content and even cultural and geographic differences; feedback from the Japanese community playing on PS5s on Toberry will often look different from what you see on the raid-heavy Excalibur, or the laid-back social-heavy Faerie, or the rather toxic raid-heavy and BR-influenced Behemoth, or people at the meme-heavy Twitter community, or the hardcore and often hyperfocused folks here on the Forums.

Also keep in mind that FFXIV is not a raid-focused game. It is, in no particular order (because said importance varies from person to person), a JRPG, an MMORPG, a virtual social community and a true-to-roots role-playing game.

So keeping all parts satisfied is almost a losing proposition, yet Division 3 nevertheless takes the ordeal.

[Sidenote: do note that I pick names deliberately: I call the *company*, the corporate entity dictating financial decisions, "Square Enix" or "SE", while I call the *developers*, the group led by Yoshi-P and responsible for the actual game we play, "Creative Business Unit III" or simply "CBU3" or "Division 3"]

I'm a bit of a software lad myself, nothing professional though, big respect for the stuff you put yourself through.

I will take this comment earnestly, but will say outright that this oversimplifies the issue.

Game development is not an individual, monolithic thing. Back when I was a producer and lead game designer, I led a team of 12, and it was hell. Tight deadlines, bosses that had no idea of what they were asking from us (and often contradicting the wishes of our own player base). It drained me to the point of mental breakdowns during online meetings. It's *not* easy, specially if you're like me and you like to micromanage the other teams while your bosses seemingly have no idea what a "videogame" is since back in the Atari era.

I don't have a (functional) crystal ball, but Yoshi-P might as well be on a similar ordeal, as he's also a producer who loves to micromanage his teams, and he loves his players far more than I did (and I really cared about mine). Except he leads *two* teams numbering on the hundreds, his player base numbers on the millions rather than tens-to-hundreds of thousands, and his direct bosses are one of the biggest gaming companies of the modern age, with executives so out of touch they might as well be taking satellite rides.

...And yet people seem to think everything wrong with the game is the result of "laziness", "blindness", "people sitting on their hands" or whatever. Believe me, as somebody who worked on game design and game production before multiple times, it's never that simple.

So what do they do? Well, they juggle priorities. They take feedback from all places, but they have to filter what's earnest and what's frankly just white noise, and then organize what to tackle first. What to prioritize.

[Sidenote number 2: When I posted my thread here, I took a quick glance at the Tank subforum and out of the first 10 threads, not counting mine, 4 were just elitist whining, 2 were from people with no idea what they were talking about, a megathread that's so huge and so full of salt that it would actually make MORE difficult for a developer to read useful feedback from, one was about Gunbreaker's sounds (?!?!) and one was the classic "will DRK be in the next live letter?".
Not exactly the reliable well of feedback a developer would wish for.]

And in prioritizing, they take into account not just what the players ask, but what the players *do*. They analyze the metrics, which tell them the most used classes, most used skills, most played content, what social hubs are the hottest at any point of the day, how many whacks people are giving on the machines at the Gold Saucer. Heck, they even analyze the memes we make. A lot.

Then they also see what content is being played (MSQ? Dungeons? Sidequests? Alliance Raids? Progression Raids? PvP?) and then prioritize them, but trying not to *starve* any of those (PvP is still using essentially using Shadowbringers skills and at least some of the balancing team is probably busy reworking that right now).

And then some of the team is working on future content. Female Hrothgar. New dungeons. The new Alliance Raids. *The next expansion*, which yes, is always already in the works. And much much more.

Players, specially the ones that complain the most, and even the ones who have very deep knowledge of their own class and gameplay style, very often lack the understanding of scale that comes with developing and balancing an MMORPG like FFXIV.

This is not to tell people "shut up and wait", but "rethink the way you express your feedback, you're not talking with a lazy bunch of dullards doing what they please, you're talking with a big development team doing their best with very chaotic feedback".

I am definitely seeing it as a healer-tank relationship, or more specifically rather how the base of the holy trinitiy in tanks/heals support the peak of the triangle, the DPS. [snip snip]

Ok, I'm gonna break my pattern and actually start to bring this to an end by pointing towards a very specific point of your argument.

You're right. Supertanks are breaking the balance of the "holy trinity of roles".

...But whether that's a bad thing or not, that's not set in stone. Because that "golden standard" is not really in the essence of FFXIV.

First of all, the scenario you described normally only tends to happen either when the supertank is at least a reasonably skilled player, or when the bored healer is at least a reasonably skilled healer. More likely when both are skilled.
...Plus, the DPSs won't really complain that they're getting a third or even a fourth buddy to push big numbers.

...In the real world, you'll see a lot of sprouts, or in-learning players, or people playing with a new class, or people who aren't really skilled but still like the game.

And when rest of the party wipes, and a talented tank, or a talented Red Mage, or a talented Sage stands their ground and solo's the boss, that's... awesome! That sparks an awesome social moment, they exchange a few compliments, somebody gets triple commendations, and they get a good story to tell.

This, to me, is far more important than balancing the trinity. I don't care about numbers if the alternative brings a more fun and relevant experience to more people.


And to wrap it up, you also kinda misjudged me when you put us in a binary of "you're hardcore, I'm pug-casual". This is never a binary, but a spectrum.

I'm an omniclass player (currently working on my last 2 classes to lvl90); I just happen to like tanking more, and DRK is my favorite (in gameplay and story). I'm also an omnicrafter and omnigatherer, who crafts her own gear. I play Savage raids when it fancies me, and I play Normal raids blind day one to figure out the mechanics. I play PvP. I decorate my house. I obsess for HOURS on what glams I'm gonna wear at any given day.

It would be unfair to call me a "casual" player. But I'm not your typical "parsing every fight, polishing every rotation, optimizing all damage, hardcore progression raider". And this kind of player is proportionally far less common than a lot of people seem to think.

And again. I'm not telling you, nor anyone, to stop voicing your wishes. Just do so with the knowledge that things aren't as simple, or as malicious, as some seem to think it is.