Thread: will midcore encounter design get any better in 7.0?

Ehh I think there're two forces at work here. One is just, fear of losing new players + desire for greater mass appeal leading to them streamlining and gutting a lot of the nuance out of the game. And another is the way this community complains whenever challenging content actually appears. On just about every spectrum, you can find it. People complained here when that EW solo duty was too hard for them. A totally different subgroup complained when the new normal raid tier dropped and had a really basic healcheck. Another different subgroup complained when the savage tier broke their statics and made them consider bringing other jobs (prompting, hilariously, the devteam to admit that they'd cleared it just fine but forgot to tune it for lesser mortals). Then in Ultimates, the content that's just hard for its own sake, another subgroup livestreamed themselves using third party tools in it to lessen the learning curve, prompting immediate staff intervention. I feel like these instances add up and paint a picture for the developers, and that's to say nothing about all the people who complained about job kits like SMN being "jank" in shb or BRD having a 180s buff CD in shb so now they've streamlined and synchronized the jobs even more and you still get people complaining in the class forums about how they just can't seem to make it work.

Don't get me wrong. I played AST and BRD before EW and now I don't anymore because the devs have gutted the fun out of both of them for me. I don't like this new direction at all. But I also can't really blame them for taking this path. There's money to be made from simplifying for mass appeal, and the current player base doesn't appear to want engaging content anyway. So I doubt 8.0 will change the direction of things, since they make money this way and changing anything would mean a risk for no reason that a noteworthy chunk of the community wouldn't like anyway.