The main reasons behind the dissatisfaction of job gameplay

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

Agreed 100% with total lack of player agency; it's a big one for me. It's been removed from every facet of the game, basically, so that the entire experience is on rails now.

But even bigger is that there are too many buttons, and almost all of them do the same thing: some damage. The ones with any side-effects mostly just establish a proper button-pressing order. Since there is no room or opportunity for variation in combat, they have to artificially enforce "complex" rotations by throwing more and more buttons on the pile. Take the Machinist's Hypercharge, for example: you press that, and it then allows you to execute a ten-button combo in which all ten of the buttons just do a bit of damage. So it would be functionally equivalent to Hypercharge itself doing big damage and then locking all your other buttons for seven or eight seconds. But it has to feel "complex," so the game makes you press the ten extra buttons.

Almost every job is designed this way, where, if you think about it too much, you realize that you're just pressing extra buttons because the game wants you to press more buttons, not because you're doing interesting things with your class or frantically responding to dynamic combat situations. Like Continuation on Gunbreaker is literally "your previous skill didn't do all of its damage, but you can press this extra button to do the rest of it." It's silly. I know people argue that it's part of a FFVIII fantasy, but it's not the same, because it's just another boring button on a hotbar.

[Valence]

Agreed 100% with total lack of player agency; it's a big one for me. It's been removed from every facet of the game, basically, so that the entire experience is on rails now.

But even bigger is that there are too many buttons, and almost all of them do the same thing: some damage. The ones with any side-effects mostly just establish a proper button-pressing order. Since there is no room or opportunity for variation in combat, they have to artificially enforce "complex" rotations by throwing more and more buttons on the pile. Take the Machinist's Hypercharge, for example: you press that, and it then allows you to execute a ten-button combo in which all ten of the buttons just do a bit of damage. So it would be functionally equivalent to Hypercharge itself doing big damage and then locking all your other buttons for seven or eight seconds. But it has to feel "complex," so the game makes you press the ten extra buttons.

Almost every job is designed this way, where, if you think about it too much, you realize that you're just pressing extra buttons because the game wants you to press more buttons, not because you're doing interesting things with your class or frantically responding to dynamic combat situations. Like Continuation on Gunbreaker is literally "your previous skill didn't do all of its damage, but you can press this extra button to do the rest of it." It's silly. I know people argue that it's part of a FFVIII fantasy, but it's not the same, because it's just another boring button on a hotbar.

Hypercharge is the epitome of artificially inflated difficulty through APM, exclusively relying on activity busyness to cover for the fact that it's just spamming the same buttons over and over until you get carpal tunnel. It's a remnant of their big new trend that showed up in ShB where every job suddenly had to become like WAR with Fell Cleave spamm (DRK Delirium, MCH Hypercharge, etc), because apparently it's funnier to spamm big moves instead of playing piano (like old Rapid Fire did with the main combo).

Now amusingly enough they've been moving away from this model a little by reducing the amount of Fell Cleaves (we went down to 3 instead of 5), and replacing abilities with new visuals like on the DRK Delirium combo or the PLD Blade combo, just to make it "feel different" and "less spammy". I don't know about you, but while I do appreciate the flavor in feel that it brings (this has to never be understated, even the new Blazing Shot feels great in comparison, it's snappy), it also hints to a somewhat bankrupt design behind that seems unable to find anything of actual interest to bring to the table.

But overall within their design that has tried to exclusively focus on encounters instead of jobs it only makes sense that they're trying to automate rotations by removing the thinking part of them as much as possible, to replace it with memory patterns and cranked up APM which are much more modern encounter friendly.

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

Now amusingly enough they've been moving away from this model a little by reducing the amount of Fell Cleaves (we went down to 3 instead of 5), and replacing abilities with new visuals like on the DRK Delirium combo or the PLD Blade combo, just to make it "feel different" and "less spammy". I don't know about you, but while I do appreciate the flavor in feel that it brings (this has to never be understated, even the new Blazing Shot feels great in comparison, it's snappy), it also hints to a somewhat bankrupt design behind that seems unable to find anything of actual interest to bring to the table.

I generally care less about flavor; skill visuals are fairly meaningless to me (I know I'm in the minority here). What I want to feel like is either that my job brings something unique and beneficial to the table, OR that I have a cool set of tools for dealing with multiple potential combat situations. But FFXIV doesn't have multiple potential combat situations, and job uniqueness has been a major complaint of the community for several years now, so, yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with "bankrupt design."

In so many areas of this game -- combat, open-world design, rewards design, the roulette system, inventory/glam systems, hell, even the generally clumsy UI -- it feels as if they've designed themselves into a corner and have no idea how to get out. And although we saw some early grumbling about it as far back as Shadowbringers (though, at the time, it was readily dismissed), we're now seeing it in earnest from a big part of the long-time player base. I have a strong suspicion that in the rush to go from 1.0 to 2.0, a lot of corners were cut, resulting in the entire foundation of modern FFXIV being a giant plate of spaghetti. And the devs are either unable to or unwilling to untangle it so that they can make fundamental changes to the game's core systems. That's why things like FATEs haven't been updated in a decade, and why job updates are so uninteresting, with most of them just being capstones that are like, "okay press this button again and it will do big damage again" -- looks cool, sure, but from an engagement perspective, is about the least interesting change possible.

[Aravell]

And although we saw some early grumbling about it as far back as Shadowbringers (though, at the time, it was readily dismissed)

People were so happy to dismiss any complaints as long as it wasn't affecting their main job. Like how you can clearly see people that don't even play melee jobs telling those who main the jobs that they should lose all positionals so the role is easier to pick up, for example.

Shadowbringers only massively simplified MCH and the entire healer role, so the majority of the community didn't care. "Nobody plays those jobs anyway".

Then Endwalker started on the DPS jobs. The SMN rework created a massive rift in the middle of the SMN playerbase, the SAM Kaiten removal got a lot of them angry. The DPS realise that their jobs aren't untouchable, so the grumbling started getting louder.

Then Dawntrail happened and the very well-received VPR got changes before most of the playerbase even got a chance to get better at it. Now the trust in the job design team is at an all-time low.

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

People were so happy to dismiss any complaints as long as it wasn't affecting their main job. Like how you can clearly see people that don't even play melee jobs telling those who main the jobs that they should lose all positionals so the role is easier to pick up, for example.

Shadowbringers only massively simplified MCH and the entire healer role, so the majority of the community didn't care. "Nobody plays those jobs anyway".

Then Endwalker started on the DPS jobs. The SMN rework created a massive rift in the middle of the SMN playerbase, the SAM Kaiten removal got a lot of them angry. The DPS realise that their jobs aren't untouchable, so the grumbling started getting louder.

Then Dawntrail happened and the very well-received VPR got changes before most of the playerbase even got a chance to get better at it. Now the trust in the job design team is at an all-time low.

I guess my issue personally is less with simplification (because I think any complexity we've ever had has been wholly artificial just for complexity's sake, maybe with the exception of BLM) and more with the fact that, complex or simple, job identity is basically gone, there's no player input or customization at all, and each job is so confined to its specific trinity role and fights are so meticulously scripted that there's just no...surprise in combat. Even if a fight is very difficult, it's still just automatically stale by the fact that it'll be exactly or basically exactly (accommodating small different permutations of mechanics) the same every single time. You never get the thrill of reacting to something unexpected.

For example, in GW2, Elementalists have a skill called "Rebound!" that negates the next lethal blow within five seconds for you and your allies and heals them instead. You don't have to be playing a healer build to use this skill; you can be full DPS and take it to help cheese a mechanic, or just save weaker players, etc. It allows for a lot of skill expression, and it's just one skill on one class. With the exception of maybe Rescue, FFXIV just doesn't have stuff like that, and it would be really cool if it did.

[Aravell]

I guess my issue personally is less with simplification (because I think any complexity we've ever had has been wholly artificial just for complexity's sake, maybe with the exception of BLM) and more with the fact that, complex or simple, job identity is basically gone, there's no player input or customization at all, and each job is so confined to its specific trinity role and fights are so meticulously scripted that there's just no...surprise in combat. Even if a fight is very difficult, it's still just automatically stale by the fact that it'll be exactly or basically exactly (accommodating small different permutations of mechanics) the same every single time. You never get the thrill of reacting to something unexpected.

For example, in GW2, Elementalists have a skill called "Rebound!" that negates the next lethal blow within five seconds for you and your allies and heals them instead. You don't have to be playing a healer build to use this skill; you can be full DPS and take it to help cheese a mechanic, or just save weaker players, etc. It allows for a lot of skill expression, and it's just one skill on one class. With the exception of maybe Rescue, FFXIV just doesn't have stuff like that, and it would be really cool if it did.

Complexity in Heavensward wasn't what I'd call artificial. Game knowledge carried you very far back then, skill expression was available and jobs had identity and nuance.

What we have now is completely artificial difficulty, I wouldn't even call it complexity. There's just 'do damage', 'increase damage', 'take less damage' and 'heal for X' abilities now, no nuance, no complexity, no skill expression, no gameplay. The whole game is basically on rails.

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

Complexity in Heavensward wasn't what I'd call artificial. Game knowledge carried you very far back then, skill expression was available and jobs had identity and nuance.

What we have now is completely artificial difficulty, I wouldn't even call it complexity. There's just 'do damage', 'increase damage', 'take less damage' and 'heal for X' abilities now, no nuance, no complexity, no skill expression, no gameplay. The whole game is basically on rails.

That's fair. I'll defer to you, then, because I honestly don't remember too much about Heavensward because it was so long ago. I mostly remember the Machinist's ammo system, since I mostly played Machinist, but I can't remember if it was meaningfully more complex, or just different.

[Daralii]

Now amusingly enough they've been moving away from this model a little by reducing the amount of Fell Cleaves (we went down to 3 instead of 5), and replacing abilities with new visuals like on the DRK Delirium combo or the PLD Blade combo, just to make it "feel different" and "less spammy". I don't know about you, but while I do appreciate the flavor in feel that it brings (this has to never be understated, even the new Blazing Shot feels great in comparison, it's snappy), it also hints to a somewhat bankrupt design behind that seems unable to find anything of actual interest to bring to the table.

It's been trending this way for a while, but very few jobs actually got anything that feels new. It's overwhelmingly potency upgrades, "new" abilities that are just animation changes for old abilities, or extra things tacked onto 1 or 2-minute CDs. Tanks also got largely unneeded mitigation upgrades and healers got more niche healing cooldowns that are rarely needed in most content. The other running theme is that most of these abilities sound and/or look terrible.

[Valence]

It's been trending this way for a while, but very few jobs actually got anything that feels new. It's overwhelmingly potency upgrades, "new" abilities that are just animation changes for old abilities, or extra things tacked onto 1 or 2-minute CDs. Tanks also got largely unneeded mitigation upgrades and healers got more niche healing cooldowns that are rarely needed in most content. The other running theme is that most of these abilities sound and/or look terrible.

This ultimately makes sense within their own vision for the game since the devs have been quoted to say in interviews that they were quite happy with the current model they had for the pve game right now. I think that specific line was dropped just a little before DT or the media tour, so it's relatively recent still. Now they have finally noticed that it's not just a few disgruntled voices but it goes a long way to show the absolute disconnect they have created between 2 parts of the community: people that are on board with it either due to being newer players or just appreciating the shift, and people that just feel alienated by it like myself.

When you decide to change the core of your game like they have you have to expect that at some point you'll generate big fracture in the audience and community that are hardly reconcilable after the fact.