I was expecting healer, and I think physical ranged is a dumb, dumb decision, but I'm not mad about it. This gives them another crack at making Noct AST viable, and focuses their healer dev time on what they should have done with Shadowbringers: Actually have three viable healers that have different strengths and weaknesses, not just The OP One, The One That Makes Parses Look Good, and The One That Can Whack People With A Really Big Healing Hammer And That's About It, because that third one is always going to be in for a struggle.
I'm only down on physical ranged because they've yet to really handle balancing two jobs fighting for one spot--adding a third makes me wonder how much adjusting we're going to end up seeing as the expansion rolls on, unless they go for the gold and get rid of differentiating between caster DPS and physical ranged DPS and just kill off the 2/2/2/1/1 default raid comp for good.
I wish that would be the case, but this is Square Enix 2019. They don't listen to their customers or fans. Not even FFXIV is allowed to remain consistently good. They had to fuck it up somehow.
- Sexist gender representation
- Time travel shenanigans
- More DPS
My hype for future content for this game has been totally deflated.
Let's be real: 1 and 3 could not be more pandering to a very large chunk of the player base. I know people like to cite how there's not TERA-tier armor in game as proof they don't overly sexualize women, but half the raid gear this tier exposed more flesh on female characters Just Because. The last race they added, Au Ra, had some of the most stereotypical teehee waifu emotes possible, and the most popular gender/race combinations tend to be cat wife and lizard wife. That the bunny race would
also be targeting the miqo'te/au ra players is unsurprising. It'll be popular as hell, people will buy fantasias like crazy. The pandering has been in since day 1. Even the giant burly mancats is a sort of roundabout way of trying to appease the vocal fanbase--this is targeted at people who play manroes, who have had no viable swap option ever. They're a smaller audience than people who want to play bunny girls, but there's no way to see the new male race and not immediately think of the group of players it's for.
And adding a new DPS is a 'safe' bet, because almost everyone plays DPS. Even if you main tank or healer, you end up leveling DPS as something to mess around on for fun. We will almost certainly see more dancers leveled in Shadowbringers than we would have if they were healers, because DPS just flat appeals to more people.
The middle thing I have to opt out of mostly because I have long since given up trying to track the story in this game, but I thought we were looking at an isekai situation which is definitely a super popular thing with many people who play these games.
SE doing dumb stuff with the direction they take the game and my disappointment in it aren't new, but I feel like nothing tonight was super shocking or out of step with the way the game's gone since ARR. They know their market and they play to it hard; it kind of sucks to not be in the section of the market they play to, but then they do occasionally do things to target that market too (see:Ultimate) and on balance it stays worth.
I was so looking forward to a new healing Job. It's been way too long, and I might want a new Job to escape to if WHM keeps getting treated badly.
Them not making dancer a healer is about the kindest thing they could do to WHM--they have no idea how to actually balance three healers, and it's always just been SCH And The Other One. If dancer was a shield healer, it'd compete with SCH but likely leave WHM as a distant runner up to AST in all the ways it currently is. If it were a Regen healer, WHM would just risk being shoved further down the bench. Honestly, my guess is their plan for future expansions is new tank OR new healer + DPS as the two jobs, and just never doing tank and healer at once. Somebody had to sit this one out, and if it gives them time to figure out how to make any healer pairing actually play well and feel worth it could pay off in the end.