State of the Game prior to Liveletter

[Theodric]

And yet, the majority of the forums at best represents a extremely small swath of overly vocal voices that think they speak for everyone.

This is exactly what people said back when words of warning were presented over on WoW's official forums in regards to the direction of that game. There's a lot of overlap in terms of development issues between both products.

[Striker44]

This is exactly what people said back when words of warning were presented over on WoW's official forums in regards to the direction of that game. There's a lot of overlap in terms of development issues between both products.

Not quite. The difference there is that feeling was everywhere. Talk to your guildies in-game and there'd be frustration. See guilds disappear because nobody logged on anymore. Watch more and more servers become "dead."

Here? The forums are the only place you see this negativity, and then you read the various threads and recognize it's the same small group of names over and over. Meanwhile, in-game guilds are flourishing, servers are strong, people are happy. WoW changed its very nature to focus on eSports and made decisions openly spiting large swaths of its playerbase. FFXIV has done neither of those, and in fact one of the biggest "complaints" from the naysayers are how the devs are giving people what they want in the form of fan-service.

[Payotz]

Not quite. The difference there is that feeling was everywhere. Talk to your guildies in-game and there'd be frustration. See guilds disappear because nobody logged on anymore. Watch more and more servers become "dead."

Idk what copium you're huffing but there are frustrations when I talk with people in-game. A lot of my FC folks don't login as much anymore, and there's a lot of frustration with job design and the endwalker story as a whole whenever I talk to anyone.

Sure my experience isn't indicative of the playerbase as a whole, but so is yours and you shouldn't go running around saying "OMG EVERYONE'S FINE GUYS YOSHI P CAN DO NO WRONG UWUWUWUWUUWUWUW SO SHUT UP NOTHING'S WRONG WITH THE GAME" like our criticism isn't valid.

WoW changed its very nature to focus on eSports and made decisions openly spiting large swaths of its playerbase. FFXIV has done neither of those.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

DRK job design? Enmity changes???
PHYSICAL RANGED having its identity ripped to shreds?? They still can't use CCs in raids btw!
Kaiten removal outrage? Brd and DoTs synergy??
SMN REWORK? OLD CARDS ASTRO??
Healers literally getting a LOT of their abilities removed from the tranisition to SB -> ShB?
Hrothgar and Viera hairstyles???

But yeah the game's okay right? We shouldn't complain right?
The dev team shouldn't listen to criticism because CLEARLY we see no wrong right?

We should all just say yes to every decision that the dev team will ever make, because clearly they know what's best for the game, not us the paying customers. Nah, it's them 100%.
And we should all consider their decisions as 100% right and we should just convince them and ourselves that all criticisms are just haters who don't like the game right?

And we should just shut up and not provide criticism, right? The game's perfect as it is!
And that anyone who doesn't like the game, despite being veteran players who love the game, should just go ahead and go to another MMO right?
We think we know what we want, but we don't right?

Man, where have I heard that before?

[Jeeqbit]

DRK job design? Enmity changes???
PHYSICAL RANGED having its identity ripped to shreds?? They still can't use CCs in raids btw!
Kaiten removal outrage? Brd and DoTs synergy??
SMN REWORK? OLD CARDS ASTRO??
Healers literally getting a LOT of their abilities removed from the tranisition to SB -> ShB?
Hrothgar and Viera hairstyles???

Enmity is not intuitive to a lot of new players. It becomes this secret system that some players know all about while others don't. Making tanks work like a DPS makes them more intuitive and the tank role has been more popular ever since.

DRK is decent, new SMN is fun, astro cards are alright but Lord/Lady should change to how it was in Shadowbringers or to be like Royal Road. Healers didn't lose a lot of their abilities, they just lost 1 or 2 each.

Physical ranged's unique utility has been homogenized a lot but the jobs themselves feel very unique. Dancers don't use heat blast and robots. Bards don't use guns or dance all the time. The Samurai changes probably weren't worth it because instead of making it easier, it makes your thumb exhausted from spamming the same button.

[tearagion]

new SMN is fun

lol, you're kidding right?

[Jeeqbit]

lol, you're kidding right?

Not at all. It's been one of my main DPS this expansion that I use for hunts and alliance raids. Just because its rotation can be macro'd doesn't mean it doesn't have a rotation. Summoning all these primals is so cool and a lot of people I've talked to about it enjoy it.

[VelKallor]

lol, you're kidding right?

Nope, enjoying it immensely. Feels smoother, more intuitive. I love it

[Payotz]

Enmity is not intuitive to a lot of new players. It becomes this secret system that some players know all about while others don't.

Except it wasn't. Enmity was clear cut and visible (in the enmity list, in the party list and the fact that the boss isn't turned towards you) and it was a core mechanic to how tanks played.

I would argue that positionals are more of a "secret system" than enmity just because you don't have a clear indicator that you actually hit your positional.

Removing enmity is like removing positionals from melee, and its removal only lowered the existing skill ceiling for tanks and the party as a whole, because let's face it, new tanks would literally just turn on tank stance and never turned on dps stance anyway.

It only affected the tanks who wanted to optimize and express their skill by balancing enmity and dps output. Regardless of how braindead simple it became at the end (prior to its removal), it was still a big part of tank gameplay that's removed for convenience (after being dumbed down a number of times).

DRK is decent

DRK lost Soul Survivor, Darkside MP management, Dark Arts, only to turn into a WAR clone with Tank Xenoglossy.
They literally have cut more from the job than replaced and is a shadow of itself compared to Stormblood, and especially Heavensward.
But hey at least the VFX is good smile?

new SMN is fun

Gotten the MCH treatment. SMN is deleted from the game, and they added a new lvl 50 job, made it lvl 90, and then named it SMN.
What little complexity it had is gone, and is now devolved into pressing a lego, exhausting lego charges, and then pressing another lego.
DoTs gone. But hey at least the VFX is good right smile?

astro cards are alright but Lord/Lady should change to how it was in Shadowbringers or to be like Royal Road.

Turned into an entirely new class just like every damn rework. There's no more flavor to the cards. It's all balance.
The class fantasy of "making use of what the cards give you" is gone for this high apm, dead simple gameplay loop of "match card to role".
The entire job now alienates old AST mains to just attract new players to the job, which is a recurring theme for literally all their class reworks so far.

Healers didn't lose a lot of their abilities, they just lost 1 or 2 each.

Healers lost Largresse, Eye for an Eye and Cleric Stance (both Stormblood, and Heavensward, take your pick on what you like).

SCH lost Bane, Miasma 2, Miasma, Shadow Flare. They lost Quickened Aetherflow. They lost Rouse. Instead of Selene being improved, they deleted it and turned it into an Eos skin instead. The fairy also lost their own separate GCD queue, so you can't use fairy abilities while you're casting GCDs anymore. You can't manually embrace anymore. Can't deploy shields off the fairy anymore. SCH itself has been turned into Whm with a fairy.

AST lost old cards. Lost Nocturnal Sect instead of it being reworked. Lost Time Dilation and old Collective. They lost the ability to enhance an arrow card to 150%, put it on someone and then extend the buff crazy high.

Whm, despite being the healer with the most basic toolkit, lost Aero 3 and Stoneskin.

Physical ranged's unique utility has been homogenized a lot but the jobs themselves feel very unique. Dancers don't use heat blast and robots. Bards don't use guns or dance all the time. The Samurai changes probably weren't worth it because instead of making it easier, it makes your thumb exhausted from spamming the same button.

Physical Ranged has been turned into a baby dps role where you only really bring them for the 1% party DPS.

The fact that they NEED the 1% Party DPS participation trophy to be included in the group speaks volumes to how utterly bad Physical Ranged is.

Physical Ranged used to be the support DPS. They used to be able to refill mana. They used to have Palisade for damage mitigation. Both Bard and MCH used to apply a damage vuln up of some kind on the boss.

Leg Graze, and Arm Graze isn't even used in relevant content anymore. The last time people used it is T7, which is sad, considering there are fights like E8S where it would've been amazing.

Raids used to have mechanics that will be a lot easier to handle if a ranged physical would go ahead and bait the AoE or mechanic for them. Things like Pantopraktor, BJ/CC Superjump, or Mustard Bomb are literally almost nonexistent in Endwalker and most of Shadowbringers.

There's literally no reason to bring a Ranged Physical, other than the participation trophy.
A far cry from how utterly useful they were in Stormblood, not because of their personal dps, but because of their rdps and the utility they can give the team.

Let's not forget that they used to have the more complex and fast APM rotations as a whole to compensate for no positionals and infinite(ish) movement.
Executing a midfire during Bulwark was dopamine inducing.

MCH itself had 2 openers, and 2 rotations each opener. Bard procs scaled off crit so the job progressively felt better and better the more crit you get.

There's a lot of subtle things that made the game feel good that were removed under the guise of "QoL" that was never replaced with anything else.

These systems weren't perfect but at least they exist .

[Nizzi]

Healers didn't lose a lot of their abilities, they just lost 1 or 2 each.

For Scholar alone, not including Role Actions:
Miasma, Bane, Shadow Flare, Miasma II, Sustain, Rouse, Fey Covenant, Silent Dusk, Fey Caress, Fey Wind, and Quickened Aetherflow (trait). Energy Drain was restored in 5.05.

Yeah, just 1 or 2 each. What's accomplished in being disingenuous like this? It doesn't change what the developers removed.

[CrimsonGunner]

For Scholar alone, not including Role Actions:
Miasma, Bane, Shadow Flare, Miasma II, Sustain, Rouse, Fey Covenant, Silent Dusk, Fey Caress, Fey Wind, and Quickened Aetherflow (trait). Energy Drain was restored in 5.05.

Yeah, just 1 or 2 each. What's accomplished in being disingenuous like this? It doesn't change what the developers removed.

dont forget most of the action roles were initially taken from whm as i remember and also whm lost adds to quite a bit if u count every expansion they removed his skills or rebranded them and gave them to all.