Skill Branching: "Everyone Wins" Concept

[Renathras]

I hate that a legitimate response to your suggestion is some variation of "this sounds great, but it would take work and thus the developers won't do it". How did we get here?

Not really. This has always been true of MMOs or any live service thing. If something requires major reworks of across the board systems, it's rarely done. It took WoW around a decade before they remade the Vanilla maps...and another before they made Classic (and, apparently, the rumormill saying they may get ready to do it again). It took FFXIV completely collapsing in 1.X for them to do it there.

While this is a SMALLER change, it's still a significant one. Not to mention they got flack every time they made big changes like this in the past, which may have led to them being gunshy. The answer to "How did we get here?" is "Because of the playerbase.", but also that "Here is where most companies and most MMOs are, so it's not unique; it's more unique it's taken FFXIV this long to reach the status quo."

It'd be interesting to know from SE where this aversion to reworks mid expansion came from

It seemed to be pretty clearly the SAM Kaiten thing. They were planning AST and DRG reworks for 6.1-3 ish timeframe. Between the SMN pushback from the total rework AND the SAM pushback on Kaiten, both were suspended. The only reason PLD got one (they were probably planning it as well) was because of how far it was falling behind the other Tanks by not fitting into the 2 min meta.

6.5 would be the best time to try an experimental 'different direction', because there's no stakes.

I disagree that "there's no stakes" - there are always stakes, and a bad rework's stakes are quite high, especially if it's a universal change which means this would affect all Jobs at once - but I also agree that 7.0 would be the best time to do it since the game is trying to have a reset and direction change and a bunch of other things. A rework of game systems OF THIS LEVEL - introducing effectively talent trees, even if super simplistic - is a major rework, so not something you'd do in a last patch of an expansion, especially since the Dev resources right now are probably already largely going to 7.0 at this point in the development cycle and that 6.5 is coming out in just a couple weeks.

But 7.0 has a narrative reset and so a more broad mechanics reset accompanying it (e.g. encounter design shakeup to require more healing...) would be the time to do it.