Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Valence]

like DNC or RDM.

( I agree with your post )

I guess I'm gonna be pedantic while we're at it, but in my eyes the only saving grace of DNC is its priority proc system that constitutes its sole source of mechanical intricacy. Everything is extremely straightforward, even the base procs out of the burst, where one just needs to press what lights up without thinking much. Where it becomes a little bit more involved is during the burst combined with Feather charges and Devilment that will fill up your OGCD slots and need to be cautious not to overwrite (flourish + Fan Dance III), while very randomly filling the gauge and asking the player to keep an eye not to overcap esprit. Besides that burst every 2 minutes though, there is literally nothing more to do than for current SMN, with no casts to boot.

DNC actually is a good example of jobs that have lost a lot of ceiling and complexity since the last expansion and 6.0:

1) EW 6.0: No more AoE melee standing independently from their single target counterparts during bursts with flourish, which is obviously to make room for all the new GCDs to cram into the window, so it makes sense, but on the other hand it removed a lot of melee uptime shenanigans (not that it would have mattered much with those new hitboxes anyway *cough*).
2) EW 6.1: Standard Step "standardized" enough so that its potency isn't much of a huge gain compared to the standard core skills which makes drifting it or the whole rotation less of an annoyance and makes the job more fluid and flexible (and a LOT less annoying on the sks thresholds to respect, it used to be even more obnoxious than MCH).
3) EW 6.1: No more proc overwrites from flourish, which is a huge downgrade in complexity since you had to make sure before that to keep enough esprit to fill the last GCD before a flourish in the case of not having any proc to spend.

Now, I'm actually pretty happy for 2) because those long cd skills are extremely annoying and tend to work against their own rotations and sks, and not too miffed about 3) either, but when it comes to all of those, they remove a lot of ceiling from the job to a point where the only thing it has more compared to SMN is procs and charges.

Just a lot less happy with the loss of the old hybrid single target/aoe melee procs that imo were a lot more engaging than just getting a button to press (starfall) when I use devilment, which has been introduced to keep DNC comparable to BRD in terms of damage since BRD got made comparable in terms of raid damage support with Coda, but feels extremely uninvolved to me (much like Blast Arrow and all those finishers).

( yes, BRD may have been gutted as well for a lot of reasons in difficulty while a lot of its problems got fixed, but it still retains tons more of little intricacies to juggle with than DNC )