Melee is easier than it's ever been. Can we stop babying the role?

[CidHeiral]

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible.

Players absolutely asked for homogenization and continue to do so to this day. There are threads on this forum right now complaining that DRK is the worst tank because it's not exactly like all the other tanks, praising GNB after it got lobotomized into another WAR clone, praising BLM after its timers were removed and cast times reduced, complaining about DRG being "too busy" which led to it getting gutted in DT, the list goes on.

Every time a job gets dumbed down and homogenized you see people absolutely loving it across social media. What percentage of the community those people represent is debatable, but to pretend they don't exist at all is nonsense.

Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for

Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

[Voidmage]

Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

The blame lies ultimately with the devs though.
It doesn't matter if one comment on the forum asked for BLM changes or if a Xenos asked for tanks to become WAR 2.0.
The devs should know and accept that there are enough people who genuinely enjoy how those jobs played beforehand.

Regarding the BLM changes they also more or less said themselves that they were done because of the fights from now on so no, those weren't to feedback.

Yes, there have been raiders asking for buff alignment being more in line and yes there have been people asking for healers becoming easier and easier but more often than not those same wishes were and still are met with heavy resistance in comments everywhere with VPR having been one of the beste examples of one person asking for it and all others being against it.
BLM changes were borderline universally hated by older BLM mains and were even on the JPN forum disliked.

I really don't agree that we blame the community for the most part and let the devs go free of responsibility.
Those are the ones who have the last say in the end and they have shown that they can and will outright refuse to change things.

Jobs have been changed first and foremost for two reasons:
To better fit fight design and like that make the development of those easier for the devs.
To get more people to play certain jobs by making them more approachable.
It's all to fit into Yoshidas view of how the game should be, namely fight design first and everything else second while bending around it, nothing more and nothing less.

[Carighan]

The blame lies ultimately with the devs though.

For listening to their players?

That can often be sensible. I remember a long long time ago in WoW (think early Cataclysm) where the devs did a change that factually made balance worse. The point was that players kept asking for a change because supposedly something was unbalanced, and the devs could not figure out why, their stats proved that no, things were balanced. They did the change, it made balance worse and they could track that. But the playerbase commented that now it was finally balanced and "felt better".

Point is, balance might be something that can be measured, but player feel is important, maybe more important than actual balance (which is why I strongly prefer interesting gameplay design over numerical balance and having both very quickly becomes impossible beyond a certain point of balance which we long crossed with our sub-6%-deviations). The devs listening to players to do more homogenization is sad, of course. And I can blame them for doing that, I'm with you there, even if you are probably correct in that many changes were maybe originally spurred by the community or that gave the push, but originated from elsewhere in their specifics.

OTOH listening to Xenos is something nobody should ever do. Seriously. Unless you need something like a bad-takes-8ball, but I suspect LLMs do that better in modern times.

[Voidmage]

For listening to their players?

Yes, that is kinda what I meant in a way.
The devs have the responsibility to look and decide what is healthy for a game and what not, even if some (note the some) players want, otherwise we would have only CT as a raid for example.

There are always two sides to it all.
Refusing so long to unlock glamour just because the producer didn't want to was a bad decision by the devs and where listening to players would have been better (though it was a decision i at least could partly understand in the past), while delaying Savage for one week was something they correctly listened to feedback.
I don't expect for the devs to always make the correct decision, mistakes are fine and some things are absolutely hard to decide but the job changes (like the BLM ones for example) for a long time now go so extremely against what it's target players wanted that it's flabbergasting.
What I find the worst though, is that those job changes only really matter and are to a large part done for Savage while everyone has to live with them.

And that's basically my standpoint on it. Ultimately the devs have to take responsibility, be it listening or not listening because it's ultimately them who do that and who should know what the consequences are.
I personally see the often brought "the players asked for it" as a very cheap shifting of the blame because I and others did not ask for it. At most I give the playerbase part of the blame but no one held a gun to the devs head regarding these changes.

But anyway, it's off topic, just wanted to throw that in.

[Reginald_Cain]

Players absolutely asked for homogenization and continue to do so to this day. There are threads on this forum right now complaining that DRK is the worst tank because it's not exactly like all the other tanks, praising GNB after it got lobotomized into another WAR clone, praising BLM after its timers were removed and cast times reduced, complaining about DRG being "too busy" which led to it getting gutted in DT, the list goes on.

Every time a job gets dumbed down and homogenized you see people absolutely loving it across social media. What percentage of the community those people represent is debatable, but to pretend they don't exist at all is nonsense.




Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

The loss of spine shatter dive and my 3 nastronds will never stop hurting. I also miss the dragon tether. It would have been nice if they reworked it to work like dance partner but eye partner.

[CidHeiral]

I really don't agree that we blame the community for the most part and let the devs go free of responsibility.

That's not what I said at all. The person I was replying to said the community didn't ask for any of these changes, which is demonstrably false. I agree that ultimately the buck stops with the devs since they should have the wisdom to not listen to bad feedback.

[Kishin12345]

I also miss the dragon tether. It would have been nice if they reworked it to work like dance partner but eye partner.

Damn that was the first thing i said after they got rid of it. We already did kind of use it like a dance partner before via macros. Pretty surely everyone had multiple dragon tether macros. Just get rid of the distance penalty thingy it had and make it so we pick an "eye partner" at the start of the fight. I'd be all for this.

[Carighan]

Yeah the eye tether being gone is sad. It was also (IIRC?) one of the last few mechanics that had a range restriction which is interesting as far as where in a fight you can fit it. Nowadays it's only Cover that still has that.

[Deejudanne]

ontop of them making viper go from fun to play to mch in melee range early expansion by removing dot management almost every other boss has an omni hitbox making positionals pointless, the only melee job that doesnt bore me to death thankfully is samurai which is funnily enough more of a caster than summoner

[Mikey_R]

ontop of them making viper go from fun to play to mch in melee range early expansion by removing dot management ..r

Just to point out, Viper never had a DoT, the debuff was a damage increase like Reaper's Death's Design.