Quote Originally Posted by Rithy255 View Post
[...]I think that easy job design is more or less very popular in endgame raids because of how hard the fight is already, Taking a black mage in a harder fight rather then a summoner is just not worth the effort.[...]
This is the major reason jobs are being simplified. A lot of designers are adhering to a tight form of gameplay design that has less flexibility in order to have higher control of difficulty, and this mindset is also taken into account for PvP. There is a balance on the number of different mechanics needed to make sure it is still interesting as symmetrical games tend to be boring, but regardless, the number values are generally pretty tight, to the point that a small gain can become extremely exaggerated in the actual results it produces.

Some people want to have MOBA style tightness in combat and places where they can flex and show off skill, but these contests do not necessarily reward people for thinking about situations and how to resolve them in other ways. BG3 for example, is a game that completely goes against everything that FFXIV and MOBAs are about. It has tons of cheap ways to resolve situations and even has methods that do not involve direct combat to solve problems. While there is something to be said about simplicity in direction, there also is a lot that gets lost in such a pursuit, and FFXIV tends to come off a bit too much like it wants to become an e-sport MMO hybrid with the direction it is going right now. I stated in another thread that FFXIV can easily exist without having hardcore savage fights because originally it was built around having multiple ways to handle different situations. This was the case as well with classic WoW, though they didn't really think too much about it outside of PvP interactions (you couldn't snare a gnoll under water and have it drown, but you could always do it to that dumb night elf player).

Some examples of interactions the old game had with content: There was a choice between using a stun, a snare, or a slow effect. Stunning a target was a short duration interruption, but you could hit the target without breaking it and could also change position around it in order to inflict more damage or apply another debuff. Snaring a target was longer duration, but hitting the target generally would free it so you had to hold back and obviously it could still hit you if you went into melee. And then slowing the targets movement had the longest duration, but since it could still move it was meant more for buying time to do something, like casting a spell such as a heal.

They annexed this kind of choice from the later versions of FFXIV, or limited it to legacy content where it is irrelevant. If someone can tank all the hits there is no real point to stunning, slowing, or snaring. If attacks are assured to hit everyone if they go off, the only option of the three that makes sense is a stun. Since they wanted the design to be about interrupting key attacks while keeping battle flow the same, they removed stuns and replaced them with interrupts, and also made mitigation a primary mechanic since it doesn't interrupt battle flow and just cuts damage. In the designers mind, these are more controllable than the old stun, snare, and slow mechanics. They also changed it so tanks always have aggro no matter what and many bosses always face a certain direction when recentering, so directional attacks are much easier to land and become part of a rotation instead of an optional attack.

IMO I feel like end game as we see it was a self manifesting destiny of design choices, since someone decided they wanted to introduce hardmode end game bosses and realized that the loose system that was far more flexible made it a nightmare for them. Someone could easily cheat a boss dead or they make some boss completely nightmarish without realizing it because of some choice in the arena.