Why does SE have a tendency to get rid of popular spell/ability animations?

[OliverQ]

I've noticed a long trend of them removing good animations from jobs for seemingly no reason. Obviously the most recent examples being gap closers. GNB Rough Divide and DRK Plunge are now a cheesy roller skating animation that's really bad. DRG lost its Spineshatter jump. I was playing my Bard, and Wide Volley at lower levels is a really cool flip animation, which is completely gone when you upgrade it to Shadowbite, which is a much worse animation.

And then you watch videos of all the abilities jobs used to have (especially like DRK which had a bunch of cool animations) and see how many animations were eliminated over the years.

Is there any rhyme or reason to this practice? We know the recent gap closer changes were to remove potency, but why change the actual animation? Why is the Bard Shadowbite upgrade a far worse animation than the one you get at like level 20?

[AnnRam]

People have lots of anxiety issues so they try to make the game as sweet they can.

[Connor]

For Bard, they likely wanted to address the issues the job has at lower level without songs by giving it an aoe proc ability along with the single target Straight Shot (though that’s a pure guess lol).

Since they didn’t have the time or resources (because small dev company), they copy+pasted a pre-existing ability - Wide Volley - into the game as a ‘downgrade’. When Wide Volley was introduced in 1.0 it was a level 50 ability for Archers, so naturally it has a very flashy and eye-catching animation as opposed to Shadowbite which is just a random addition to your kit at like lv72.

Tl;dr, they couldn’t be bothered making a real animation for Shadowbite downgrade so they copy+pasted a pre-existing that was initially something else entirely (a GCD, for one thing lol)

[Garolymar]

I still miss Butcher's block to this day man. They should've added the life steal to that ability and got rid of storm's path animation

[Kaixern]

I have honestly no clue about why they do this for the other classes.

But when it comes to DRK, the only thing that comes to my mind is either:
They don't know what to do with the class or they hate it.

[Canadane]

I still miss Butcher's block to this day man. They should've added the life steal to that ability and got rid of storm's path animation

Butchers Block was also just a sped up Godsbane animation from 1.0.

https://youtu.be/RDNQSJwCzCo?t=26

SE bring back Godsbane, PLEASE.