DT Job Reworks - Unconfident Developers and Poor Communication

[jonimated]

I've been playing Monk since at the very beginning of Heavensward and it wouldn't be much of an exageration to say that "throwing things at the wall to see what sticks" pretty aptly describes the job's development history from then until now. Though it's also often been coupled with a lot of handwringing from the developers to please try out what they've made even though it's uniformly rejected by the playerbase leading to the Monk forum riots of 5.X.

Give the fast job a slow? We hate it. "Please try it" they beg, but we did, in fact we probably played it more than they did if subsequent interviews are any indication. Still they couldn't be assed to remove the Slow that we'd rejected and they knew we hated for the Shadowbringers launch.

Now it seems like there have been enough jobs added that everyone is getting the Monk treatment. While Monk continues to get the treatment it normally received outside of the aberration that was Endwalker, IE: Randomly changing a system with promises that it won't change the job flow and replacing our timers with Balls, only to screw that up because they seemingly prioritized the aesthetic of the gauge over how the job actually flowed.

Stormblood Monk is often lauded as being peak of the Monk experience. In fact it's often seen as the peak of job design, and for very good reasons.

Back then we had more potisionals, management dots, execution skills. Jobs which had gauges to manage had multiple skills to spend said gauge on. Basic combos had more branches (for tanks as well). Enmity management was still a thing leading to skills specifically designed for that purpose. There was just so much more to consider during a combat encounter outside of the boss pattern. That era in job design is often held is such high regard for a reason.

Honestly folks who either didn't play then or don't remember hit up the waybackmachine and open the FFXIV job guide page from the Stormblood era. It was a different time indeed.

I'm not sure how we got from that to where we are now, but it seems through the updates and expansions post-4.0 jobs have just had all their edges sanded down to the bland stumps we have now.