It is with the utmost of any and all possible due respect that I must ask…
…What… precisely… is your major malfunction? Are you blind? Perhaps hard of hearing?
Were the advances of the resident Adonis on your job balance team spurned by a DRK main?
Yo! Spock to bridge! Is your universal translator malfunctioning?
Did you all leave extremely expensive sets of noise-cancelling headphones on?
Are you alright? Have you been kidnapped and blindfolded? Should somebody dial 911?
Knock knock… anyone alive in there? Hello…?…
…
In other news, while you were preparing to release patch 4.1, Trump finally got Kim to nuke us. The entire USA has been Fell Cleaved. We’re all dead and can’t pay our subs anymore. Except for all of our anti-vaxxers. They escaped, cancelled their subs and used the savings to buy jetskis, and are riding them to Japan with their kids as we speak. Adam Jensen called. He says he never asked for this. Meanwhile, every Japanese car in the U.S. has transformed into a Decepticon and they are establishing their own society here to start a new world order after they have wiped out all the humans and glassed every major world government. Latest intelligence says they may have discovered how to summon Bahamut IRL.

Now that I (hopefully) have your attention…

Ahem. There is a nearly-60-page feedback thread with more views than Zalera has active players that has been sitting on the front page of this forum for more than 2 months, about a job whose name you didn’t even so much as whisper in your most recent live letter, and now with the patch notes many of us were anxiously awaiting, it still goes completely unmentioned in the list of job adjustments, whilst generous buffs were given to its primary competition for a teamslot, a job which was already rapidly pushing it out of even the midcore meta. With these changes (or lack thereof) the job is pretty much indisputably the worst in its role in every possible category (damage, mitigation, team utility) other than (some would argue) ease of use during early prog. I’d say these changes easily put WAR on par with PLD overall, making the weakness of DRK an elephant in the room of 2001 Xbox proportions, which I’m incapable of fathoming how you’ve managed to ignore. Short of hacking the official forums and coding the title of that thread to flash in rainbow bubble-gum font, I for one am fresh out of ideas.

That feedback thread is not alone either. Since SB’s launch there has not been even a moment where a feedback thread on DRK of some form or another has not been sitting pretty on this forum’s front page. At times there have been several. At the point that the main DRK feedback thread had been created, there had already been multiple metric gigatons of threads on the topic, but even after several minor patches with no fixes to people’s primary complaints, we dutifully nuked that thread in a fool’s hope that somebody was watching.

What is the reason for this level of stoic neglect that you can’t even verbally acknowledge the fact that you have gotten so much feedback in any of the public addresses to your fans known as live letters? I would argue that even PLD got more attention than this in 3.x. They weren’t the right buffs or particularly helpful, but at least it was some acknowledgement of feedback. You didn’t have to dig through the forums to know people were complaining about that job, all you had to do was look at the patch notes. Speaking of PLD, have we not learned from our mistakes? Seriously, what is the reason? Where is the logic? You’re getting feedback, a lot of it - do we stutter? No? Then respond to it please. If we wanted to mindlessly vent into the abyss, get into multi-page internet arguments, or pontificate endlessly into echo-chambers destined to never be seen or heard of by the developers, we’d post on Reddit. The forums are touted as a place where feedback is actually reviewed, although I gotta say, my ability to make such a statement with a straight face is waning.

I know that balance in MMOs is considered by many to be a myth. But this particular MMO is made by you, Square-Enix, the company that released FFXIV 1.0, failed, issued a heartfelt and honest apology, and then rebuilt the entire game from the ground up (both IRL and in the lore) into what it is today, an MMO giving most if not all others a run for their money. I for one have higher expectations, expectations that have largely been met up until the release of this expansion.

Kindly get your fingers out of your ears and onto to pulse of your playerbase. This is a colossal disappointment and slap in the face, except a slap in the face would technically be a form of acknowledgement. People have been blowing up that thread here for months, with the sole hope that you might listen, and you have gone above and beyond in doing the exact opposite, effectively wasting the time of everyone who bothered to give the feedback that you ask for. I’d like to see some formal statement of design intent explaining to us all what the perceived purpose of DRK even is at this point. If the development team believes, by whatever wellspring of blind and unquestioning faith, that this job is working as intended and/or balanced, do us the courtesy of declaring as such, so that we may all heartily LOL and move on with the proper perspective and expectations for the future, however bleak they may be.

P.S. -to my fellow players of FFXIV, let this thread be ever-living proof that “LOL wait for the patch notes.” is not and never will be a valid statement in any discussion of PvE balance.