Is there a point in caring about the game?

[Kaurhz]

100%.

A huge part of why even dungeons felt interesting in ARR and HW was because back then jobs had a very high skill ceiling. There was always something to do and something to think about even in dungeons.

With that high skill ceiling and depth, jobs become content in and of themselves. Learning to master a single job became fun. And it helps make content like FATEs and alliance raids interesting because even when you've seen the same mechanics a hundred times you may not have really thought through how to optimize on each job mapped to the fight.

At least for decent players this does not exist anymore. Every job just feels like carbon copies of each other, especially the healers and tanks. I swapped to Red Mage and Gunbreaker in EW and just casually got 99s and 95s in Savage and Ultimate after mainly playing healers even though I've literally never played them before. This shouldn't be possible. It's because jobs are so braindead and so similar to each other now then once you have mastered the core ideas of keeping uptime there is nothing else to master on each job, except BLM before all the gutting. Now I actually struggled on that job in EW and it took effort to get good and learn nonstandard. But alas that is the only job where it takes any effort to become good at on top of the skill you've acquired from raiding in general.

This 100% wasn't possible in Heavensward and to a lesser extent Stormblood. I toyed with Summoner in HW and just reading Hai Hai's guide and learning the triple weave opener took weeks to get to an acceptable level of performance. Now you want me to swap to MCH and pick up the job in a day or so before we do a week 1 kill of Savage and meet the DPS check? Fat chance back then! You'd be completely griefing your static. In EW and DT? I literally don't even need to practice on a dummy before going in.

This is probably one of the biggest factors I missed honestly when making a judgement on anything.. But when I looked more at how crafters were, versus how they are now from my own experience, I can at least relate to many of the problems that people have with combat. It was a game that asked for your attention and rewarded you for it if you gave it that attention. Like the inane amount of time it took to figure out how to utilize WWYW without completely obliterating your CP pool, or how long it took to figure out how to pull off a Byregot's Miracle > Byregot's Brow, or at which point it was best to use Brow over Blessing, or just in general the amount of debate going on to find optimal rotations, and with how varied many of them were because control scaled in such a way that it rewarded you for sinking millions of Gil into melding.

I would honestly say though, it's not really for decent players where this issue exists, I would actually say it exists for casuals too.. I mean, I'm probably average or slightly above average if not for the fact I don't really engage with it, but functionally there's no difference regardless of the class I decide to play, bar the aesthetics of it... Viper and BLM were probably the exceptions to this, where BLM feels like a lot of it was intrinsically tied to the content you were doing, especially to make use of mobility. - I just generally don't get why they are insistent on removing versus reworking or fixing.. It's why I don't really have much faith at all, regardless of whether people say it's a step in the right direction, because that fundamental mindset is going to remain the same.. Don't fix it; remove it, then try and add something else to compensate for it, whether that's the introduction of ultimate to accommodate for making savage accessible, seemingly? Or whether it's putting crafters through the shredder and then releasing expert recipes to try and appease. It's funny here, because I would consider myself part of the core audience for expert recipes, but do I find them fun? No, because there's very few abilities to actually utilize where I can gain control of the recipe.

It definitely wasn't intuitive at all back in HW or SB, (Why aren't you using Bane, bro, it's awesome), as there were always little things that would slip through.. I can understand why people took an issue with certain things, but with anything it's best to try and rework it to find the middle-ground versus removing it outright, and even when they don't remove outright, then it's usually subtly plunging into irrelevancy (e.g., GCs), remember back in HW you actually needed to run dungeons, be it sync or unsync, or had to spend enormous amounts of time farming Gryphonskins because the game actually made things like Arachne Web relevant to both recipes and the market, even well over an expansion later, and even if you didn't want to, because it was effort, then you could still sit there and sell Titanium/Level 54/55 gear.