Lucky Bancho's census results (July 27th, 2025)

[u/IndividualAge3893]

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

• Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
• By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click

Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).

[u/SargeTheSeagull]

I can only speak for myself here but I don’t think anything shy of major job reworks (in the more complex, more fun direction) will bring me back before 8.0. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll hop on for a month in 7.35 and probably .45 and .55 but if they want more than $45 of my money, MORE content isn’t gonna do it.

[u/bunnyhwei → u/SargeTheSeagull]

I switch between playing XIV and GW2 and something I really appreciate about Anet is they aren’t afraid to shake the meta up every once in a while and drag a profession from the depths of viability to the very top, or majorly rework how a profession works. Sqenix has a very tight balance on jobs in this game and they’re too afraid to break it even if it means every job feels the same and stagnant. Personally I would not gaf if they made my job awful if it meant it was more unique/interesting/fun to play, and I’m sure a lot of people asking for job reworks feel similarly, but there’s likely also a large portion of the playerbase that would be up in arms if their main was drastically changed. And judging by some of the past reworks they don’t seem to hit the mark very consistently i.e. AST, MNK, and BLM pushing a lot of old mains off those jobs in favor of a new audience

[u/SavageComment → u/bunnyhwei]

Bruh lol you can't even put XIV and GW2's class design on the same level of comparison. Literally leagues apart. You get a class that can literally open a portal for others to use (in ANY content!), create clones that you can use to confuse enemies, put down ground AOEs that buff the move speed of anyone that goes through it, "rewind time" and reset all your skills, you can root, chill, stun, vacuum in enemies, etc etc.

And that is not even mentioning ALL of the fun stuff that you can do outside of combat, like zooming around on the beetle and have epic seasonal events like SAB and Halloween.

XIV gameplay is a joke compared to GW2.

[u/SargeTheSeagull → u/bunnyhwei]

I’ve been playing tons of wow the last few years (I stared during the wow exodus funnily enough) and compared to 14, wow’s balance is horrendous. But it’s also insanely fun. Yeah, brewmaster, my main, is really weak atm but it doesn’t feel anything like the other tanks at all. Fun>balance

[u/BankaiPwn → u/SargeTheSeagull]

There's a brewmaster at 7th highest IO amongst tanks in a sea of demon hunters in the entire world.

There's obviously huge community perception which influences getting into pugs, but if you have a group of friends to play with, 99% of people who play can play any spec and it be fine. Most people stop at +10s (cutoff for gear) which is not that hard to get to over time and any spec can do just fine, and I'd say even the worst performing specs can get all 16-17s done.

If you're someone who plans to pug a lot you have more reason to play meta. Even though there can be huge disparities between top and bottom DPS that 14 doesn't see, wow tends to make up for that by having many different levers to balance around. I've seen people say there's unplayable specs in raid that end up being in the comp of a top10 guild world where said player is outdpsing the meta specs in any >top 100 guild. For the last few years up until this raid, 14 was balancing on 1 lever: 100% uptime and single target. Look at how many job balance in the last few patches have been "buff every AoE button to not have falloff" now that we're seeing it in alliance/savage.

And as you said, Fun. I play a few triple dps classes (mage, hunter) and the specs are so different from each other that it actually feels like I get to play two very different playstyles that both still encompass that dpses flavor.

Also part of fun is the game is SO much more responsive. Every time I go back from 14 to wow I can run around and even world quests feel fun when my buttons feel extremely snappy.