Sorry, I'm looking at this from the perspective of the past 10 years, not the perspective of someone 10 years ago. I believe that Sony failed to produce varied content for all of the different classes and setups. To compensate, they slowly but surely homogenized the classes. They also simplified their systems and used more spreadsheet items. It had the effect of reducing development costs by decreasing complexity. Just my opinion.

Basically, the initial "vision" was too complicated and costly to continue. They set out to decrease the amount of unique conditions to develop and bug test for. This "streamlined" the game, increasingly.

This is why I saw the strong move towards linear things, consistently: To reduce costs. Linear things produce less conditions. This means less things to test and develop for. They were very cautious.

I would buy all these arguments given by them, if these incidents were isolated. But they're not.

And one more thing... They may not have known consciously what they were doing. They gave all these arguments year after year. But underneath it all, they couldn't cut the mustard. Maybe declining interest and shifting funding (to other games) inevitably led to a kind of cognitive dissonance or denial.

If they had come out and said, "We can't meet the demands of our initial hopes and dreams," I would have understood and even forgiven them. It was the denial that was unforgivable.

They invented the genre. I'm sure they could have done a ton of things better with a crystal ball. WoW copies the Hell out of EQ and still messed things up.

Point is your advocating for more of a balance towards healing and less towards damage. That's understandable but what do you want, Pallies to do half a warriors damage? A quarter the damage? At some point the sheer frustration of game play gets old because mobs have a ton of hps and when Warrior's get nice taunting weapons (epics, BoC, Frostbringers) the gap between knight and pure melee taunt diminishes.

Also, a LoH dot is nice for solo work but for saving your cleric or chanter from dying? :o

It doesn't matter really. You have your opinion, I have mine, and other people have theirs. The game only went one direction and the P99 dev's aren't prancing through Willy Wonka's candy shop magic wanding things.

Anyway, whatever. DPS is like sex. Put it out there and make your money.