Raid buffs and combo actions should go.

[Jeeqbit]

SE can't force the meta 100%, and I think they need to realize that, how they haven't in the past decade is beyond me. They were probably thinking the same thing as you are here, every expac "If we just removed ####, it'll help us adjust #### to ####!" then kept chopping, and chopping, and chopping.

I think that SE do force the meta, whether on purpose or not, by buffing certain jobs higher, then other jobs higher than that a patch later so people can't rely on their job staying meta for long and that helps to make people not bother with metas as often.

I think you are simplying SE's intentions too much with this though. It wasn't all done to control metas. Removing damage types such as piercing and slashing was but a lot of the abilities that were removed were to make them easier to get into and easier to play for a casual player.

Like AST, I used to say.. "Okay, what do we need from me this fight - I can focus on certain cards and go Nocturnal" - But now I'd go, "Should I bring AST or SGE?", which also means I don't even get the luxury of changing strategy mid-fight or between pulls. Your choices are typically just "Who do I use this on now?"

We have to consider how useless certain cards were or would be now though.

TP was removed and we no longer control eachother's MP (plus I always saw these as useless and put them into Royal Road anyway). Spear and Arrow messed up rotations, some players wouldn't be able to adjust their rotation to the new timings and it would probably do that even worse now with how strictly everything needs to line up for 2min bursts. Bole's mitigation was liked and used by a lot of Astrologians, but so is Cure and just like there are people who spam their attack button instead of Cure, there were people who just kept fishing for the balance or spear/arrow as second prize instead of bole.

[R041]

...

I mostly agree to an extent, but what I was getting at is that SE can't force meta 100%. They can get a good idea, but they'll probably fail to capture it, and you know what? They shouldn't be the deciders of Meta, that takes the fun out of everything. They pre-plan way too much for us, and that just means SE is attempting to play the game for us before we even get to play it. Be a little more adventurous. They need to give classes more types of utility overall so that they can shift gears when necessary, not decide that the class itself should be a specific way by threading a needle.

I think the big problem is we're focusing on pigeonholing all of this into Raid scenarios, when these things were all relatively useful and fun in FATEs, Open World, Dungeons, and other Normal tier. I get that these abilities can mess up precision, but you could really say the same thing for WoW utility - Those should be discussed and put into the engagement plan. Not thrown away entirely.

So I don't think they were necessarily useless, I do agree that it was a horrible method of obtaining said modifiers though. Making it completely random felt pretty horrible, but getting rid of the option altogether I think was a terrible idea and just pigeonholes us more. It's kinda like saying Jump is useless. Just because we don't jump in raid content, doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. (Rough example, 1.0 reference)

I also agree with the TP statement mostly, but that was also because the abilities themselves and Sprint were designed poorly around it. You could say the same thing for Mana honestly. If our Sprint was tied to Mana we'd think Mana was shit too.

...

I think you misinterpreted what I said, not your fault. I said I wouldn't get rid of it. I would add more to offset the possibility of classes being locked out of content due to that utility pigeonhole. You basically agreed with me, but aggressively. lol

Also I think job engagement is a totally different issue I didn't even discuss. That's a problem within itself, just as the 500ms / low tick rate is. Because once job diversity and reactive abilities are out the window, we realize that there's very little fun to be had with each class. It's like playing the same DDR song a hundred times a day. That doesn't sound fun at all.

[HyperiusUltima]

I think job engagement is a totally different issue I didn't even discuss. That's a problem within itself, just as the 500ms / low tick rate is. Because once job diversity and reactive abilities are out the window, we realize that there's very little fun to be had with each class. It's like playing the same DDR song a hundred times a day. That doesn't sound fun at all.

I think I misread on that part. Sorry for that. Sometimes my mind fogs up a little when I'm at the computer for too long.

Regardless, I think the level of diversity you're looking for is a one size fits all solution, is it? Because what they're trying to do is preserve their trinity of Tank/Healer/DPS while trying to inject some type of change, albeit small in scope. Their mechanical changes to the game have been massive every expansion up to this point. Heavensward was the only expansion to expand upon jobs extensively, whereas with Stormblood we got Gauges(which, mind you, some are nigh useless in their current iterations), Shadowbringers we had the overhaul to jobs to remove over-complexity(when they had people playing jobs in ways the Devs didn't intend like MNK's original Riddle of Wind), and now in Endwalker we have the 2-minute meta enforced harshly.

It now becomes a question of if they're going to bother fixing their problems next expansion, as certain jobs are losing popularity - PLD currently because of fear-mongering, and healers because of their current state. All we can do is tell them what's wrong and hope they will listen, since I'm not sure how the NA team filters our posts.