Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Renathras]

...

You're pretty much right, though your view is not generally shared by the forums, so...but you're right. Especially about this:

I would MUCH rather have more interesting and difficult challenges then a job that is designed to be complex...just to be complex.

The encounter should be the obstacle....not the job getting in the way.

It's why I support the idea of different Jobs within a Role (no Role has less than three) having an easy/simple, medium (or two), and complex/hard Jobs in it. That way, people who want to run their faces through coals can choose to do so and those that don't want to do that and want Jobs that aren't nerfted and gimped and clunky to the point they barely even work can simply choose the other Jobs. Everyone wins.

EDIT:

Even by reading all post, I really struggle to find the past game more complex/deep other than more messy and tidious.

Can someone take some time to explain what they mean by "Simplification" ? Maybe we just disagree, or maybe we didn't talk about the same things.

It's honestly a lot of rose tinted glasses. For example, SB WHM had two DoTs instead of one, and they had awkward durations instead of the clean ones we have today. One was 15 or 18 sec and the other was 18 or 21, I don't remember which. It was frankly annoying. There was also Aero 3, but that was mostly used in AOE by people for a long time since it wasn't clear to people if it was a single target gain or not. WHM today still has the spam nuke and DoT, and traded Aero 3 for misery. So in effect, it lost one DoT and a lot of clunk. And don't get me started on SB's version of Lilies - they were not like today, they just reduced the CD of abilties used by 5% or something, and to generate them, you had to cast Cure 1/2 on targets. That was also true of Confession stacks from Plenary Indulgence. It made no sense at all. WHM in ShB was far better. SB WHM sucked so bad.

If you really really go far back into the past? apparently you have Bozja/Zadnor like skills that jobs used to have. Cleric Stance and really archaic designs.

Bozja/Zadnor recycle names, but not abilities. Cleric Stance didn't work the same at all. It was an annoying mechanic that swapped your MND and INT stats, and cut healing by 20% on top of that. So when you were in Cleric, you couldn't heal except for % healing effects like Benediction or (in ARR) SCH's Lustrate did a flat 25% heal and Eos's heals weren't affected by it. Nor was Stoneskin. So SCH's remember Cleric way more fondly because their kit actually kind of worked with it. Oh, and the best part was, it was a toggle and had something like a 5+ second before you could cancel it, meaning if you activated it and then the boss got a string of crits on the tank, you were just hammering Cure 2 and hammering Cleric so you could turn it off as soon as it was up so your Tank and party didn't wipe. And if you hammered it too much, you could accidentally reactivate it.

Cleric is the single most rose tinted goggles ability that I've ever seen in MMO history. Such a horribly bad ability that some people think was the height of Job design, it's ridiculous.