Quote Originally Posted by CelestiCer View Post
And there are Raiders that actually support this! gladly accepting every simplifications... with the empty promise of better mechanics and fights that 99% of the player-base will never even touch. Although... Parser masochism-syndrome could be a thing, as anything that stands in the way of a shining parse ( players included ) is just a nuisance. So any simplifications to them is welcomed, utterly idiotic.
Funny thing is... they don't. Practically everyone who actively parses despises the two minute meta because it's so RNG reliant. High end parsing boils boils down almost entirely to whether they game decided to let your big hitters DHC. Jobs like Ninja see 100,000 Hyosho differences all because one run the DHC'd and the other they didn't. Same exact rotation but the game told them to fly a kite. Speaking of, even Melee players are largely dissatisfied with the absurdly large hitboxes. Which is a perfect example of this dev team overcorrect for prior mistakes. Most uptime complaints were focused around fights like E6 or E8 where you had prolonged disengagements where you couldn't come up with creative solutions to greed to mitigate your downtime. It simply forced you off the boss.

Even then, it was less parsers complaining and more about your average PF hero killing themselves to things like Act II in Hesperos that prompted to change. Like I go into below, SE is more concerned about accessibility at the lower end than tailoring things around what the high end wants.

Quote Originally Posted by grinkdaboy View Post
well i think ultimately it boils down to the top 1% shaping the game. the top 1% who would cheat as much as they can get away with, and remove as much visual flavor/abstraction from encounters to make it resemble something as close to pong as possible. these are people you are also competing for logs week 1-2 too. they demand homogenization. every role has been severely homogenized. homogenization also means that utility on jobs is also homogenized. no more ast card abilities or protraction. TP was removed so no tp card/bard tp regen. MP regen was standardized so no more MP song. so the only utility they can really give now is mitigation/personal heals.
Spoken like someone who has never set foot in any of these communities.

Raiders never asked for homogenization or sweeping changes to utility. They simply proved none of it was actually necessary. Good healers weren't constantly demanding their Bard take a 10% damage penalty in weekly reclears. It was inexperienced or downright bad players who spammed Medica II or Cure III and bottomed out their MP who were expecting other players compensate for their inefficiencies. TP was removed because it was a boring mechanic with no actual skill benefit. You simply sat their sucking your thumb until it removed if you ran out and Invigorate was already on cooldown. Paladin and Monk couldn't even maintain their rotations without Goad, contributing to the dominance of Ninja. Astro cards weren't reliable, thus you couldn't factor in things like Bole into a mitigation plan. Thus, it was never needed whereas Balance was always valuable.

All of these changes were at the behest of inexperienced or more casual oriented players. In fact, when Straight Shot and Heavy Thrust were removed, Yoshida literally said it was due to "less experienced players having difficulty maintaining it, which caused an increased gap in damage." In other words, their priority throughout the last two expansions has been to narrow that skill gap as much as possible so the difference between a good player and a bad one isn't astronomical.

The current state of jobs is entirely due to the dev team's endless pursuit of accessibility at all costs not because hardcore raiders cried over parse nonsense.