Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
It leaves us as agreeing to disagree I would guess. It's just a habit of mine to point out that a common source of frustration is people masquerading their own opinions as if they were facts, and then making themselves progressively more annoyed when they don't see things changing to their liking while ignoring the possibility that it's because many others have different opinions and might be the main target audience for the dev team.
I still do believe our "frustration" or "opinions" are solidly based on facts though. They may remain opinions at the end of the day, but I don't like the idea of dismissing them just because they're opinions. I wouldn't mind if they were baseless, hot air, but I don't think they are. For the major facts usually brought forth:

- Encounter design is tied to the difficulty and type of content you run, job design covers any type of content regardless of what someone runs, and allows to have fun no matter the content, unlike the former.
- Encounter design has shifted heavily toward DDR unique puzzle solutions, where different ways of solving a mechanic is often arbitrarily designed so that only one solution is accepted by the game.
- Encounter design has shifted very heavily toward body checks as a result of a whole removal of party resource management and a scrappy/recovery/sustain based gameplay.
- Role design has progressively removed failure states such as 1) requiring a healer in a lot of scenari, 2) tanks being virtually immortals to ensure such failure states do not happen, 3) the progressive bleedover in mitigation role identity, notably everybody and their moms getting mitigation tools now.
- 2min meta leveling down every damage profile onto an identical pattern of burst spikes every 120s for every job, constraining job design even further to more identical models. No more damage sustain job profiles (like old BRD, BLM) or semi burst designs with more regular but weaker bursts, but also no more extreme burst oriented jobs on the DPS side (like old MCH). On the tank side, a dramatic increase of tank burst now fitting into the 2min meta and able to compete with DPS profiles (notably DRK being something like second highest burst job in the game right now).
- The elephant in the room: healer rotations having turned into 2-1-1-1-1-1 spamm, and overbloated ogcd healing toolkits.