Most Important Dawntrail Change to Keep me in FFXIV

[PyaKura]

I'd like to reply the general sentiment of "we're not going back to how things used to be, ever" found in the first page (sorry, I haven't read every post in the following pages).

I've been a long time copium huffer myself as far as job design goes since Shadowbringers dropped, and I still am and here's why. I do believe that Square Enix does listen to the playerbase, but they were subject to the same phenomenon every company looking for feedback on their product does. People who were happy with the way things were didn't feel the need to speak up because they were already satisfied with what they had, which ended up with the unhappy part of the playerbase consequently be the bulk of the feedback which made them seem like the loud majority.

Up until now, the game has seen a steady simplification of jobs ever since HW. This is pure conjecture, but consider the following:

ARR: Jobs were fairly simple, this was SE's first try at making the game's... endgame.

HW: With a higher level cap came more skills and passive abilities added to the game with little to no pruning, which meant the overall complexity went way up, which from SE's PoV was probably the natural flow of things.

SB: HW happened and with it came its fair share of complaints about how difficult/clunky/you name it... everything was. SB was SE's first attempt at reducing the complexity and homogenizing jobs within their respective role.

ShB: The playerbase was generally happy with how SB turned out overall, so I could see SE believing they had to continue down this path to simplify things even further. People realized ShB was pretty mid as far job design went, but I personally recall the overall feedback *against* the simplification fairly lukewarm. Most jobs were still similar to their SB counterparts, so "it wasn't that bad".

EW: That's when it really dawned on people that SE had (up until now) no intention of making jobs more complex than they were. With the full homogenization of jobs around a 120s timer and most minor optimizations and other subtleties out of the picture, the previously lukewarm feedback turned into full on discontent and I feel like there are way more threads (be it here, Reddit or Twitter) talking about job design than ever before.

I feel like we're now witnessing both sides of the playerbase swapping places, with the previously unhappy part be content with the state of the game, while the ones who were happy with HW/SB job design are now speaking up.

Change takes time in this game because major revamps pretty much only come alongside expansion releases, and because the feedback SE received also evolved progressively over time, they now have to pull the brakes on 4 expansions worth of momentum in their job design philosophy. I think we can progressively go back to how things were but it will definitely take some time on SE's part to ease the entire playerbase into more complex job design.

There is also one last thing copium huffers like me can still latch onto, and that's Yoshi-P's interview with IGN Brazil which you can read about here : https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...sil_game_show/
Yoshi-P is definitely aware that a good chunk of the playerbase is unhappy with the current job design, and to me that's proof enough that they read what we say over here and are open to change. The outcome depends entirely on us and how much noise we make as a community to see the changes we want to see come true.

And for what it's worth, I haven't seen many threads about keeping the current job design the way it is, so the stage is all ours.

(Apologies for the weird English, it's late and my brain can't brain properly)