Square enix headed in the same direction blizzard did with WoW.

[Rufalus]

These modern MMORPG developers really don't seem to understand one simple thing: People play MMORPGs (and even the MMO-lite stuff with action elements) because they enjoy micromanagement. If you're pruning in an MMO, you're doing things wrong. If a skill has become useless, rework it into something else, but do not remove it.

We want a crapload of skills. We want to open up a spellbook and ruminate over the wide range of spells. We want to make decisions. What we do not want is to be told, through pruning, what to do. Start telling us what to do through linearity and we'll be unhappy and we will stop playing your game.

This is absolutely true for some people but not a rule for everybody. MMOs have evolved and the types of people who play them broadened. S-E said people were begging them for fewer buttons so much that there's even some people who redo their hotbar each time they enter content at a different sync level. For some reason they don't want to use additional hotbars and can't fit all of their buttons in at once; they only bring the buttons they think are most relevant to the duty they are doing. They are for sure getting pressure from part of the community to consolidate stuff, not doing it out of ignorance or malice.

I will say though I think it's not the amount of buttons but what you do with them. MMOs can still be engaging with fewer buttons by shifting the complexity into other parts of the design and having the hotbar be more contextual, adapting it to offer only the relevant options you need in that moment. It's less intuitive to navigate a bigass spell list during what is pretty much action combat these days. When combat was more slow and thoughtful, tactical, it made sense. I like tactical games too but it's not this game. However healer dps specifically has always been boring in this game imo. That has been consolidated too much, even back at the beginning.

[YanderePrincess]

theyre so good it took them 2 years to adress white mage being worse in every aspect to sch and ast!

Because they made the assessment that healers as a whole needed a level of change that would require the time and resources to make it appropriate to pair with the following expac. As I said, paying attention doesn't mean they do everything you want. It doesn't mean it's going to be able to happen quickly, either. And really? WHM worse in every aspect for 2 years? Exaggerate much?

[YanderePrincess]

These modern MMORPG developers really don't seem to understand one simple thing: People play MMORPGs (and even the MMO-lite stuff with action elements) because they enjoy micromanagement. If you're pruning in an MMO, you're doing things wrong. If a skill has become useless, rework it into something else, but do not remove it.

We want a crapload of skills. We want to open up a spellbook and ruminate over the wide range of spells. We want to make decisions. What we do not want is to be told, through pruning, what to do. Start telling us what to do through linearity and we'll be unhappy and we will stop playing your game.

Um, no? There is literally no point in having more skills than I can access or actually use. DDO had that because of it was based on v3.5 D&D. We didn't "make decisions." We took the exact same list of spells 99% of the time because they were the most effective spells. Blue Mage in FFXI is probably the best example of this concept being done right, but even they had specific layouts they'd take depending on the content they were doing and the role they were playing for that content. The only "choice" involved was possibly in which role you'd fill, but that was less often your choice than your group's choice. Choices like this get subsumed by cookie cutter builds, because in an MMO what's most effective will reign.

I feel like you don't properly understand what micromanagement is, either.