Combat system is beyond saving.

[Valence]

That’s true, it’s just an odd trend I’ve noticed where the ones who talk about how “terrible” the balance of HW or SB were seem to only be people with later join dates. Clearly, whatever HW hatred some people have now wasn’t prominent enough at the time to justify sharing their own feedback about it back then.

I first decided to register on those forum in 2018 to ask SE to do something about MCH latency problems during late SB, but I've been playing since 2015.

It's because players who were bad back then could not utilise the jobs to their fullest potential, playing a meta NIN at 30% output was a massive detriment compared to playing an off-meta MNK at 70% output.

What the dev team is doing now isn't going to kill off any meta, it's going to end up solidifying the meta even harder. Because it's so easy to pick up and get good at any job in the current game, people can easily just lock in meta comps and always get players. It's going to become even harder to join parties as an off-meta job as they continue making jobs easier to hit peak performance on.

In my opinion it's more a problem of a damage meta slowly shifting toward an effort based meta, since most damage discrepancies are being softened (which isn't a bad thing mind you) while they bring more and more braindead jobs like SMN and DNC that account for more than half of the raiding playerbase of their respective subroles.