Future direction of FFXIV

[AziraSyuren]

People aren't complaining about the removal of things like Blood of the Dragon or Enochian.

No, people are complaining a lot about that. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things they complain most about. Boring upkeep gameplay is the first thing a lot of people point to when they talk about jobs being simplified.

The proportional difference between the high and low end has remained very similar since StB, with the major exception being healers and tanks (and even then, healers are the only really egregious example); that's what I mean by skill ceiling. The capacity to push your job's output higher than the average has not changed much. Nerfing the skill ceiling would be something like how they changed BoTD from HW to StB more than anything they did in ShB onwards.

If you are insinuating that FFXIV’s endgame has any sort of longevity to it, then you are sorely mistaken. Any longevity is from artificial caps (e.g., Tomestone caps) or from drop RNG (e.g., EX Mount farming). Patches don’t have enough for people to stretch out the entire 4 months of relevancy unless they just aren’t logging in and playing for extended periods of time.

They can't do that! Everyone knows that giving content longevity automatically equates to the devs making it mandatory to compete (or even get involved) in a high end raiding environment!!!!

:')

[ForteNightshade]

That's called you need to take a break...You are the .01% that consumes content way too fast.

The irony is I did. In fact, I sat out almost the entirety of 5.2 after clearing the Savage tier week 2. All I did was cap tomes and log out. I still managed to BiS an entire separate role and begin getting caught up on Primal mounts when I came back. I got caught up much like HyoMin in little under a week despite there being a whole patch's worth of content.

You also assume everything I listed has been done over a short duration. I've been playing for seven years now. Several of those Ultimate weapons were all farmed in Shadowbringers despite two of said Ultimates releasing in Stormblood. I didn't "rush" them nor did I rush anything else except leveling my crafters. Not as though leveling crafters is difficult. Spam some leves and you'll go from 80 to 90 in an hour. Most of my TEA weapons came from my second group which ran 9 hours a week. No exactly hardcore grinding now is it?

The problem is content simply doesn't last. Hence my example—of which you conveniently ignored. What does 6.1 offer with any longevity? This is the fourth attempt at PvP, thus you'll have to forgive my lack of optimism. Otherwise, I have Ultimate to look forward to. If I weren't into raiding at that level though, I'd only have a 24 man and an EX to last me four months. They could be the best versions of those respective modes in the game's history yet will eventually run out their shine.

No, people are complaining a lot about that. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things they complain most about. Boring upkeep gameplay is the first thing a lot of people point to when they talk about jobs being simplified.

The proportional difference between the high and low end has remained very similar since StB, with the major exception being healers and tanks (and even then, healers are the only really egregious example); that's what I mean by skill ceiling. The capacity to push your job's output higher than the average has not changed much. Nerfing the skill ceiling would be something like how they changed BoTD from HW to StB more than anything they did in ShB onwards.

This is simply false. Unless you're going to provide citation, I've seen almost no real mention of those two specific abilities. What is talked about even to this day are things like Foe's, Heavensward job design and even tank stances—make what you will of them.

And this is also false. Player skill was abysmal in Heavensward; leading to a far wider gap than we have nowadays. The difference is player numbers have substantially increased alongside player skill throughout the years. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of players have no idea how to play their selected job at even a half way level but it's better than the days of ARR and HW.