you can learn to play a job in like 15 minutes. There is NOTHING fun or enjoyable about doing leveling content PLEASE be serious. It's just a massive time gate between actually being able to do fun content
No ones gonna read all this but posting for my own sanity.
People want the illusion of choice. The minute you make anything relevant to dps is the default the majority will assume you go with and grill you on if you don't. So is there really a choice?
People complain about the 2 minute meta but no one outside of savage is telling you you HAVE to play that way, you're just leaving dps on the table if you don't.
A large part of the stability of ffxiv balance relies on the social contract of hoping people play the "right" way but outside of day/week 1 progging that's not going to be much more than a suggestion. You can play your class however you want, youll just do dogshit dps. Same will happen in a new system.
This is largely the issue the player base faces now but the majority has agreed that the discourse is the system and not how people interact with said systems. If they added in other stuff, and it gave you dps, it would become the new normal.
This is largely why I agree with their choice to make aesthetic choices and maybe change actions and stuff moving forward until they can find a way to balance 20+ jobs for the tight design encounters they have in XIV.
Giving players ownership how a job feels vs how it literally plays kit wise is the safer bet. Some may not agree with that choice but its still a good alternative alongside jobs themselves being alternatives to "traits" (i.e. bastion being the gun range hybrid vs paladin being the magical range one).
I will always say players need to choose which they want. Encounter design thats tight or job design. Bozja was fun to play, but the whole game being Bozja would suck ass and be an unmitigated disaster to balance and pf things. The floor being where it is, intentional or not, encourages more drop and go play in things like pf.
All this rambling to say people want the illusion of choice but ultimately the same people who go to the Balance and look up how to play their job now will continue doing that and enforcing/griping about "meta", and the people who dont play their jobs well now will continue to not do so.
People just want to feel like theyre making a choice but its already been made for them based on how they engage with the game. You will feel the joys of choice for 6 weeks and then drift back into the comfort of consistency, letting others decide for you what the best way to play is.
Whoever decided to allow the timeline here to open for 1.5 seconds before automatically refreshing without any user interaction should never again be allowed a job, in any industry, ever