Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
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.