How could you do this to AST?

[HyoMinPark]

Considering we had to wait until a specific sound-related error happened during a livestream for Yoshi-P (and/or the Dev team) to acknowledge that it was an actual error, and only then finally started looking into a fix for it (and finally fixed it), among various other examples I'm sure you and I and others could possibly bring up, I do think it's necessary for them to acknowledge issues (not to mention, it at least gives us the peace of mind to know that they really are aware; unlike that statement Yoshi-P made at the reveal of Dancer, where he stated he was completely unaware that people wanted another healer, or the lack of comments about healer's malcontent over this entire expansion). To me, refusing to acknowledge an issue presents an inherently higher chance that the issue won't get fixed, because it implies that there is no issue at all.

Just snipping this for length—

The refusal to acknowledge issues doesn’t mean that said issues don’t exist. The developers are very much aware about the issues surrounding healers this expansion, if for no other reason than people have been incredibly vocal about said issues sine ShB released. Just because they don’t directly acknowledge things as a “problem” doesn’t mean that they aren’t aware of them. Take SB WHM and their lilies: they were aware before 4.0 even released that the lilies were flawed—healer mains and theorycrafters that had analyzed the pre-expansion media tour information kept warning them that the Lily system would be defunct. Their “solution” was “Just wait and see”. 4.0 drops—and the Lilies are a problem as predicted. And they continued to be a problem for the entire expansion. The developers never directly acknowledged the problem...but come 5.0 media tour and, well, the lilies were overhauled.

While they have acknowledged other issues in the past—SAM and NIN issues this expansion, for example—they have also not acknowledged other things that may be problematic, and instead fixed them anyways without prior warning. Most job changes are addressed with “we’re adjusting X jobs next patch” but they rarely ever tell you what is being adjusted (outside of “we’re buffing potencies” usually—SAM and NIN were a rare example where they went in-depth a bit more about their plans, but it’s fairly standard for SE to remain hush hush on stuff). Usually they add in a footnote-esque comment after the fact of “oh yeah, we heard the feedback on this so we fixed it”. But again: silence doesn’t mean they don’t know. They’ve stayed silent about healers this entire expansion, but there’s no way they aren’t aware of the issues and dissatisfactions present with them. Every region has complaints.

AST complaints have gone on for years. And I’ve seen a lot of them focus on the Sects and how imbalanced they are (when the complaints aren’t about AST’s utility). It’s very possible the developers have kept up with that feedback, and despite attempting to fix the imbalance for 6 years, they’ve decided to just axe the hybrid build and give AST the regen-healer treatment since its the standard.