I like how healer mains are responsible for a disproportionate number of complaints on this game’s direction lol

Not that I blame them, but as a 6 year tank main I find the assertion that the devs are constantly lowering the skill ceiling of most jobs to be a little strange. Removing upkeep stuff is a skill floor thing which has little to no effect on how high you can push the performance of a job, and the difference between good and bad players is the same as ever, with WAR, SMN, and healers being pretty much the only major outliers. Even then, the difference between a good tank and bad tank is still pretty massive no matter what the raw damage numbers show. Raid mechanics are also more complex and difficult than ever, with first tier difficulty having remained the same since Stormblood. That being said, O3 and O4 are definitely much better fights than P3 and P4 regardless of their difficulty, and P3/4 aren’t even that bad.

Dungeons have also remained roughly the same in quality since HW, with the only difference now being that the devs are less willing to occasionally throw in that one experimental dungeon with strange and usually pretty cool mechanics, and more willing to throw in the occasional forced single pull with a coin flip between whether or not the damage accommodates the lower number of mobs. Which is a shame, but still not a big difference in the end. The only thing I really want is a dungeon that’s as cool and fun as Gubal Hard, which is the best expert dungeon of all time, fight me.

Either way, I guess these individually small differences do compound into something much greater to some people, but we’re not really on a downward trend and I see no indication that it’s getting any worse.

The devs are just refusing to make a lot of this better. The name of the game in HW was silly and experimental bullshit that everybody hated and I think I want a little more of that back. Give me more shit that starts out as some of the worst, most boring content in the game that eventually blossoms into something truly special (like deep dungeons). Bring back some of the weirder and jankier mechanics in Eureka in the next exploratory mission series, like fighting mobs being more important along with difficult terrain (but not to the extent of Pagos, please). Give us more shit to do with Blue Mage. Bozja was great and all, but it was way too sterile and not nearly experimental enough outside of DR and it’s Savage counterpart.