Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
I agree with the assessment but I'm pretty sure the devs are perfectly aware of what they've been doing. Even for the BLM reworks I have so many friends that are happy with it (including raiders), and for the fight design it's no different. There is also people unhappy with it but they all have left the game by now. It's why I do feel that the devs are just dead set on a vision they do have, but it comes at the cost of a fracture in the community. All of what they've been doing so far has generated a lot of heated debates and bitterness everywhere I've looked, and it's not getting any better.
Which is why it will be a critical mass thing. People will grumble and gnash teeth until, all at once, the population will drop off a cliff. This happened once before in HW when the devs shocked the community by making every class way too hard to play, designed gordias with god mode, overtuned the damage, broke the game because of server ticks, and combined it with a 1 month vacation for the devs.

I'm all in favor of giving the devs a break, they just really shouldn't let off the entire dev team on an expansion release where things can, and did, go horrifically wrong. Because HW almost literally killed FFXIV off. Again. The best design FFXIV has ever had came as a direct result of overreacting to HW breaking the game. Stormblood. And if people can see stormblood-styled class and fight design, I feel people would prefer that even over 7.2's fast gameplay, especially those, like me, who have netcode-related issues.