DT Job Reworks - Unconfident Developers and Poor Communication

[jonimated]

FFXIV job design has been a victim of death by a thousand cuts. Throughout the updates and expansions every edge, every point of pushback, has been whittled away little by little to eventually become what we have now.

"It's fine we can get rid of Darkside. It's used on the same abilities every time anyway."
"We can remove Monk positionals. Nothing will really change."
"It's ok to get rid of Kaiten. It's just Samurai Darkside, and we got rid of that ages ago. It will still be totally the same."
"We can just remove enmity management, right? It's just a needless hurdle."
"Do we really need jobs to have any sort of gauge management? What if we just had 1 ability that used gauge so players didn't need to think about it."
"Sure we can remove Noxious Gnash. It's just a useless management tool anyway."

Any one of these changes in a vacuum to a single job may have been fine. It's the process of making these types of changes multiple times for every job over the course of several expansions which has lead us to job design we have now. Sanded down every edge into just blunt boring stumps. And realistically if making a change is "not going to change the job that much" then why even make the change in the first place? As someone above stated as well for some jobs, like Samurai and Dark Knight, it has also had the unintended side effect of stripping away job identity.

We are at a point where for most jobs (and even tanks for that matter) you can accurately sim an entire fight down to the GCD. And I don't mean using theoretical numbers and average proc chances. I mean if you know the "when" and the "how long" for downtime you can predict with 100% accuracy which GCD you will be pressing at minute 6 second 24. You will also know exactly how much resource you have at the time, have already spent, and will have and spent over the duration of the fight.

I can only speak for myself in this but I find this to be so unbelievably boring. If FFXIV allowed for proper cast sequence macros most jobs could assign an entire 10 minute fight to a single button. Great video game design.

The devs, and Yoshi-P, don't even really seem to realize anything is wrong. There's no signs of a course correction at all. Changes they have made in this very expansion reinforce that.

[Valence]

I can only speak for myself in this but I find this to be so unbelievably boring. If FFXIV allowed for proper cast sequence macros most jobs could assign an entire 10 minute fight to a single button. Great video game design.

The devs, and Yoshi-P, don't even really seem to realize anything is wrong. There's no signs of a course correction at all. Changes they have made in this very expansion reinforce that.

They're happy with the game in challenging content being about rehearsing a rigid script. Whether your rotation can be adjusted or not, in fine, it will always remain something that can be macroed in one single button provided encounter scripting remains static, or provided your job doesn't have any rng mechanics.