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.

In hindsight it should've been recognized as the canary in the coal mine that it really was. Five years later and all job design turned into directionless slop, devoid of all thought besides "press glowing buttons, do damage".
Phys ranged were arguably the first canary in the coal mine even before the healers. They got massively gutted from HW to SB. Many would say for a good reason, but they have made ZERO attempt at incorporating some of the fun elements into the SB iteration. We could have Gauss Barrel turning the gun into a shotgun that has to be charged up at close range (a melee range cast) to give it some depth, while limiting its uses per minute so that you still have a lot of movement where necessary.

Dark knight arguably too, but I haven't really played the job much back then. But they were 100% gutted by ShB when Dark Arts got neutered.

SB to ShB just gutted so many jobs. You could say that over half of the jobs got neutered in some way or another: all three healers, Dark Knight, Warrior, Monk, Machinist... Ninja got dealt a heavy blow in 5.1 or something with the mudra rework........

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