You do realize... casual players did precisely as I described when Cleric Stance existed, yes? They completely ignored it. In fact, healer DPS wasn't even demanded back in the days of Heavensward unless you were attempting Savage. Ironically, it's both Gordias and Midas which contributed to the increased necessity of healer DPS. When the difficulty lowered from Creator onward, players quickly discovered how little healing was actually necessary. It's by the devs own design DPS became both the standard and expectation even if it were wholly unintentional on their part.
Moving forward with the history you're disregarding is Stormblood saw Cleric Stance reduced to a 5% damage button. There was no longer any clunky stance dancing or accidentally using oGCDs with only 10% efficiency. Scholar and Astro were both at the absolute height of their popularity, especially the latter. Meanwhile, White Mage did languish is what may have been the worst job iteration we've ever seen with the comically poor Lilies. Bit ironic that the healing aspect of the supposed dedicated "pure healer" is what they screwed up and not the DPS aspects of Scholar and Astro, which were highly favored. To emphasise this point, Alphascape remains the only tier in this game's history where Astro actually surpassed White Mage in Savage usage. Granted, it was already creeping up behind it during late Sigma and throughout UwU.
AIN is always tank due to how the system prioritize roles in order. This was brought up on the discussion reddit after digging around with third party tools. It begins with tanks and will only switch to healers if tanks are no longer in need even if healer have less numbers. Which is why you'll see Tank in need yet get insta-queues with healers. Furthermore, tank's low popularity can be attributed to multiple factors like them being glorified DPS nowadays who take less damage.
This called statistical averaging. You only need enough of a sample size to make an assessment on the probability of a majority opinion. Surveys around the world, for example, aren't pulling hundreds of thousands or millions of people by a few fraction to get a generalized average.
Sticking to FFXIV itself. We know there are significantly more than 8,299 people playing Bard yet that number is still high enough to assert Bard is extremely unpopular at the Savage level. Especially when compared to previous iterations, specifically Stormblood, where that number was more than double despite a much lower overall playerbase.
In the case of online opinions, if the overall sentiment remains vastly one-sided, it suggests mass indifference at best or those opinions are, indeed, widespread even amongst the average playerbase. We've seen this play out with content like Lords of Vermillion, Diadem, Blue Mage, Eureka (specifically, Pagos) and even in job design itself. Whenever the online portion of the community, be it here, reddit, discord or whatever, voiced near universal negativity towards a piece of content, the devs usually make adjustments or abandon it altogether. Of course, there are exceptions like the aforementioned Lilies but they eventually relented.




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A3S and A4S just set the bar really quite high. You had to really be on the ball, IMHO you absolutely needed multiple people parsing in the group and you had to be willing to replace people for the good of the group if need be. After I stood down from hardcore raiding partway through the tier (House fire reasons) I later cleared it with a casual to mid-core group precisely because we were willing to make the cuts as needed.




