FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Renathras]

The problem is they want classes where average people can play and be good enough to clear content meanwhile not seem so complicated they are off putting or scare people to play but also have a semi high ceiling for people to master. Will this ever be achieved no, you'll always cater more than one side or the other...

Honestly, this is why I believe in systems that have a spread across different classes. In WoW, there were always easy and medium and hard and super-hard classes. Warlock was "the hard Mage", and Mage always had at least one spec that was pretty easy (Frost almost always was, Arcane was in Mists, etc) [when comparing FFXIV to WoW, you honestly have to look at each spec as a class, like Prot Paladin would be PLD vs Holy PLD would be more like WHM or something]. And this was ALWAYS true. Hunter was memed on for years, for MULTIPLE expansions. Vanilla raiding Hunters early on were auto-attack only because of debuff caps on enemies and agro reset limits. [I still remember the "It's fun to be a Hunter 'cause my pet gets attack-power~r! Woo! I'm makin' $12 bucks an hour!" "Cause you a damn cheater!"]

Wrath of the Lich King era Holy Paladin was LITERALLY target the off-tank, cast Beacon of Light. Target the Main Tank. Cast Holy Light. Do this for the next 20 minutes. If you want to get frisky, hit Judgement of Light from time to time if the 25 man raid doesn't already have 2 other PLDs to cover that (given how strong Prot and Ret were at the time, btw...it always did). Oh, and fights didn't have the ARPG/DDR style of modern FFXIV ones, so you weren't running all over the place. Some fights you could literally stand in one spot and cast Holy Light for 15-20 minutes without moving or with just kind of waddling out of a fire zone from time to time.

Even the most jaded of anti-FFXIV Healers would be hard pressed to say THAT was better than this. And that was an MMO that had 13 million players at the time.

I think the solution is to make Jobs different. Caster has SMN (easy), RDM (moderate), and BLM (very hard), and they all co-exist pretty well outside of the min-maxers. The truth is, most people playing will never be doing content where they would need to pick a different one than the one they like (e.g. RDM mains feeling they "have" to swap to SMN), and it gives that sub-role a distinct feel since none of the three play alike and they run the gambit from pick-up-and-play SMN to you-must-spend-10k-hours-to-master BLM.

I think every role should work this way, and arguably, the basics of it are already there. DNC, WAR, WHM (and SGE since we have a Pure/Barrier split). It's good to have Jobs of all levels so that most people can find one they like. "But what if I don't like the difficulty of a Job I like the aesthetics of?" Well...what do you do now when that comes up? I like BLM's aesthetic but not playstyle, so I don't play it. Others like the aesthetic enough they get over their dislike of the playstyle. Welcome to real life where you can't have everything you want sometimes. The point is to have options to please the most people, since any other way, you're just choosing who to cut off.

.

Some people are just hyperbolic - "FFXIV has the worst healer design ever!!" - not realizing "the boy who cried wolf" is a story for a reason, as is "Chicken Little". If you constantly scream the sky is falling, you can't be surprised when other people look up, see the sky is still up there, and write ALL of your arguments off because you couldn't control yourself to just making reasoned and thought out arguments instead of stooping to hyperbole and emotive appeal to try and win people to a position you can't win them over on.

Boy did this post age well

I mean, it kinda has, actually.

OP was correct that FFXIV would continue growing and that WoW would have a massive exodus. Called that spot on. WoW continued to decline, Shadowlands was a disaster of an expansion coming off of Battle for Azeroth which was ALSO a disaster of an expansion and the current one is receiving a firm mediocre - which, to be fair, is high praise after two total disasters and a massive company PR fallout making the brand near toxic. Legion was their last decent expansion and Mists was their last really good one (amusing since, at the time, people who were haters couldn't get over the Pandas, but it ended up being their last really great expansion overall).

From what numbers we do have (Lucky Bancho and Steam numbers, respectively), they've both shown FFXIV growing from this point in the prior expansion, which means continued growth, and WoW has a good chunk of its playerbase playing Classic instead of Retail.

So despite your incessant naysaying and thread necroing: This thread actually DID age pretty well.

Jokes on us all: The reason SE hasn't released a Necromancer Job is they allow Titanmen to keep making alts without a perma ban so he can keep necroing threads. We've had necromancer all along!