Quote Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas View Post
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The recurring answer seems to be 'we're actually playing other roles now', which is a sensible one. Like taurus suggested, the role will likely have to fall completely flat before a change in the design philosophy can be initiated.

But I also don't believe that the average player is specifically in it for a 'challenge for its own sake'. What it really comes down to is the balance of effort and reward. As long as support roles remain sufficiently 'comfy', there's always going to be a subset of the playerbase that migrates to them, simply for the opportunity to weave watching their favorite shows inbetween GCD heals. If the healer population doesn't plummet next expansion, it's unlikely to happen in the long term. I think as an individual, you have to make a conscious decision on what you are willing to invest your time in.

I'm not so sure about the job designers claim, though. I remember something from an interview back in Stormblood that has been paraphrased for many years, but I haven't seen anything recently about the number and distribution of designers. If you can point me to a source from this expansion, I'd be interested to see it.

I do think that more needs to be done to communicate job design philosophy with the playerbase directly. It'd be great if when it comes time to do the job showcases, that they break it down into a number of smaller reveals by role, and really take the time to discuss their design philosophy on each (especially since we're going up to 23 jobs next expansion). The Endwalker job reveal itself was several hours long, so they're bound to cut corners in discussing some jobs if they try to get through it all in a single sitting.

The SCH issue strikes me as relatively obvious, but you do have to read between the lines a bit. Historically, SCH has generally had a dedicated spot in raid comps. I've watched the dev team attempt to stealth nerf the job between expansions since Stormblood, and they're consistently forced to backpedal from the backlash. This time around they just turned it into its own subrole, to split the SCH fanbase up. It's an effective strategy, and they've done it before.