Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
It's not so much that they decided they were afraid of job complexity suddenly after 6+ years of gameplay with a semblance of it, it's just they decided halfway for some reason to make their game into a different game altogether while alienating half the veteran playerbase in the process.
I think it's more that ARR was a "shot in the dark" and that they took about 2 years to make changes (ie. they are made at expansion-level).

Heavensward tried to respond to the issues with that "shot in the dark" (like raids not having a story version, raids not being cleared by enough people, not having cross-world PF) and iterate on content ideas (trying out things like Diadem, Deep Dungeons, changing bosses from being WoW-like to scripted dances that involve brain-training/learning the script). Through that, they found their main content formulas that remain today.

Stormblood just cleaned up all the jank, still, from that "shot in the dark" that was ARR. Useless abilities, cross-class into role actions (arguably resulting in some homogenization), elemental stats/materia, parry/physical mit removed (resulting in most mitigation being homogenized). But this is where they made a major change in direction to stop making people track tiny status effects like in a lot of MMORPGs, and instead have a "job gauge". By this time, it had been about 4 years. Despite that job gauges arguably make things easier and things had started being homogenized, Stormblood is still seen as at least a compromise rather than reverting to Heavensward, since we're unlikely to stop having job gauges now.

Shadowbringers was the bigger change in direction, obviously, because aside from cleaning up the remaining "shot in the dark issues" that resulted in tanks stacking/melding Strength by rebalancing stats, they seemed to stop caring about job uniqueness and there were now too many jobs and too many issues to bother trying to balance damage types (piercing, slashing, etc). And they wanted to make jobs easy and intuitive to play and hard to mess up, something that has remained in progress for about 5 years now.

So what I think really happened was they just iterated on issues with their original "shot in the dark" on a 2-yearly basis, so it wasn't that they were ever fine with how it was so much, they were just slowly figuring out ways to address the perceived issues over time. Although I do think the exception is that they abandoned the concept of "job uniqueness" because all references to this just completely, noticeably vanished from their vocabulary around Shadowbringers.

(For the record, I agree they were issues, regardless of if they were solved the right way)