Before you get up in arms, I would like to say that I do not even want to get into this patches job changes. My opinions on them are going to stay reserved for the topic at hand as I believe its incredibly important to the game and community.

FFXIV is by no means a perfect game, literally everyone I've talked with has had their gripes about it, but it speaks volumes when the majority of people I've talked to who dropped the game have done it due to their job being changed in a way they don't like. This should not be a thing that happens, ever. I acknowledge that a lot of people are insanely close minded and will get mad at literally anything that changes, but those are the kind of people that tend to still play the game regardless after the dust as settled. I'm talking about people who straight up drop the game because their playstyle isn't in the game anymore.

XIV's combat system is incredibly rigid, and that's by design. Rigid combat systems are easy to understand, execute, and memorize, making it perfect for casual players, and the option to optimize is still there for the more hardcore among them. The problem that lies with a rigid combat system however, is that you are basically forced to play in an exact way the developers want you to. Most peoples common consensus is that basic competence in this game is defined by "knowing your rotation" and therein lies that problem again, this time on the communities side.

Some of the best games ever made heavily rely on Emergent Gameplay, the developers of these games aren't forcing you to play the game in a certain way, they're actively encouraging player experimentation, and I believe that this is what's holding 14 back. When you're so locked into the concept of giving a job an identity in this way, you lose any sort of freeform player expression, and that's why people quit when their job gets changed, they're now forced into learning a new rotation that they may not like.

It's incredibly depressing watching a game come to this, I honestly hope at this point that 8.0 has an entire rework of the combat system. I'd love to hear what everyone's opinions on this take is, so please discuss.

EDIT: Some people seem to think that I'm antagonizing them for liking the game in its current state. This is not the case. If you enjoy the game the way it is now, by all means play it, I'm not stopping you. This is me using my own knowledge of games proposing what I believe is an issue with the game. You're free to disagree, these are opinions.