Quote Originally Posted by Absurdity View Post
Mostly naivety. Coming from Stormblood into Shadowbringers most people still thought the devs actually knew what they were doing.
Stormblood Machinist, while still competitive in a perfect environment, wasn't exactly a great experience. The expectation was that the 5.0 rework was a clean slate to build a new identity upon, instead it ended up completely directionless and just got more random damage buttons stapled onto it as a bandaid.
I don’t know why anyone thought this clean slate argument was going to go anywhere because SB to ShB wiped 4 jobs back to a clean slate (MCH, WHM, AST, SCH) and they literally could not articulate why they decided to do this for especially the healers. HW->SB was really the end of the devs making a change and being able to go “we did this change for x y z reasons and aim to achieve a b and c” starting with those 4 job wipes it became “give it a try” or complete radio silence

Sure we had more trust back then but you could see their design slipping in SB, the pointless gauges, toilet paper Lilys, the god awful 4.2 WAR redesign. Their “control” over the jobs really felt like it was slipping in SB