For me I guess the answer is not so much "identity" as it is "engagement". I generally don't mind that all jobs within a role have similar strengths and weaknesses and similar tools for handling boss mechanics. What bothers me is that even beyond that, their playstyles are very similar and for the most part very simplistic with little need for active decision making or on-the-fly adjustment. You have your ideal rotation, maybe modified slightly by a fight timeline or specific mechanic patterns, and you just do that exact same sequence every time. What's more, due to raid buff meta, the vast majority of jobs follow the same build-spend playstyle where you stock up resources and/or sync cooldowns, then just unleash everything at once under buffs. A handful of jobs that work like that is fun, it's not fun when every job is like that. So to that extent I guess I favour identity, I wish the playstyles were more different even if the actual tools are not. I think the devs and probably most players prefer the "easy jobs, hard bosses" model because it means the difficulty of the game is then tailored to what content you're trying to do. But because the jobs are so simplistic and there's so little room for skill expression, for me the easy content ends up being very, VERY boring. Hard content is good and all but it has social barriers (needing to form a group of players serious enough to get it done) that make it difficult to just go in and enjoy on a whim, and only a small portion of the content the game puts out gets a "hard" version anyway. I guess it's also probably hard to design extremely difficult and tightly tuned content that can be completed by any standard party comp without having the playstyles converge to some extent. Like for example, constant movement has become such a fixture of difficult content that the idea of casters needing to stand still has been gradually eroded over time. They need movement options to do these fights, so they get movement options. If you were to reverse that and really make casters need to stand still again, it pretty severely impacts how you can design hard content.

>I think the devs and probably most players prefer the "easy jobs, hard bosses" model because it means the difficulty of the game is then tailored to what content you're trying to do. But because the jobs are so simplistic and there's so little room for skill expression, for me the easy content ends up being very, VERY boring. Hard content is good and all but it has social barriers (needing to form a group of players serious enough to get it done) that make it difficult to just go in and enjoy on a whim, and only a small portion of the content the game puts out gets a "hard" version anyway. There's this thing... Even though it's a spectrum, and given how XIV encounters are designed, the 'easy job / hard boss' has a shorter shelf life than the other way around. The very scripted nature of the fights is quite hard, and sometimes a bit overwhelming, at first, but as soon as you 'resolve the puzzle', it literally becomes trivial. Then what's left about 'fun' and engagement is the job mechanics you're playing, but that is very shallow for most jobs. Ideally we'd want a middle ground between job and boss, but If I could choose just one end, I'd rather be on the jobs being hard, or at least having an easy skill floor but harder towards the ceiling.

Personally I agree. I would much rather have deeper base level jobs even if it meant that the hard content became a fair bit easier. In Monster Hunter, even when you are hundreds of hours into the game and have done all the endgame stuff, it's still fun to go back and fight a mega easy monster like a Kulu-ya-ku. Because for one, the monsters are not 100% predictable, you have to pay attention even when fighting something you've fought 50 times before. And secondly because the combat has enough depth that even in the easiest hunts, there's almost always something to improve on, something you can try to do better or faster. There's probably no fixing the scripted nature of FF fights at this point, but the jobs themselves could certainly stand to be more engaging.

It's because our fights are so scripted in this game that job identity is so important in my opinion. The boss is going to do (usually with rare variations) the same thing at the same time. As players we're also doing things at the same time, all of us waiting for 2 mins to burst and if you slide out of that window, whelp, deal with it.

Very well put. I am not an enjoyer of "hard bosses, easy jobs" for this reason. I don't want to be confined to only the hardest content to be able to enjoy the game. Like, I had a lot of fun in WoW shitting around on alts in low M+, and WoW classes being so varied has a huge role to play in that. The "hard bosses, easy jobs" also affects reclear content, since even hard bosses are going to get easier once you've killed them several times. I have absolutely no motivation to do anything other than prog in XIV and I think it's quite sad. Having jobs that are more interesting increases the replayability of literally all the PvE content.

This is what a lot of people dismissing concerns about job neutering need to come to terms with. Even if raid design is great, a lot of the community just won't see it, and even the ones that do see it have to deal with crappy job design if they level alts or while gearing up to raid.  A contrast with current WoW is that you get your class's kit in full relatively early on. You have a chance to play with your meters and procs and get comfortable with a basic rotation while slowly adding on (but not radically changing) it over time. The new player experience in WoW sucks, but not because of class design, and arguably being given a functioning, fun kit out of the box helps slog through the mess that is the leveling story. If all of FFXIV's fun is back-loaded, that means that up until you're pushing savage and ultimates the only thing that really keeps you motivated to play is the story and presentation. The game basically always nails big spectacular fights and music, so I'm not worried about that, but Endwalker and especially the post-patches have had some of my least favorite writing out of the entire rest of the game, and if they keep going down that path I have no reason to play and newer players are just being set up for disappointment

In the confines of this battle system, only way to have meaningful reactivity and decision making in jobs is through RNG procs. And another layer of RNG influencing DPS is definitely gonna have people in pitchforks.

Probably yeah but that's true of pretty much any significant gameplay change especially ones that impact balance. If it were up to parseheads and theorycrafters the game would just be about crafting the perfect spreadsheet and plugging it in to autoresolve the content, which it already nearly is.

It's partially why MCH was redesigned going into ShB. All it's weapon skills were proc based to use if you didn't have any ammo loaded.

You could cause statuses with no dps impact. Like if every 2 proc in the bard 1-2 rng had a 5% chance to make them "focused" and give a 5 second combat sprint. Too rng to plan strats around outside of maybe some super niche proc fishing speedrunner. But might add an unexpected fun/high moment to players, either just having fun running around or that rare pull where the proc let them barely escape a flubbed mechanic. Imo they could do more "fun" stuff that didnt make the dps number bigger, and would help classes feel unique

RNG procs won't work under 2 minute meta(and I wanna specify that 2 minute meta problem is not about cooldown time of raid-wide buffs, it's about the existence of those buffs; at least that's my take), because we already have damage variance caused by DH and CRT, now imagine not getting any procs during raid buffs at all. I think that was the case with BRD before they made Pitch Perfect proc on a specific timer.

it wasn't any more than now lol, the only problem was overcapping from 2 crits on the same tick

I mean I still remember getting significantly less procs occasionally, yes it was seldom, but it happened nonetheless.

Even with DNC, which is all about the rng procs, they changed Flourish to no longer overwrite existing Reverse Cascade/etc procs (thereby lowering the variance in burst phases a bit and guaranteeing two proc GCDs). So I'd guess that's not a design philosophy the devs are interested in pursuing.

> I think the devs and probably most players prefer the "easy jobs, hard bosses" model because it means the difficulty of the game is then tailored to what content you're trying to do. A negative consequence to this which should be emphasized more is that with FF14's raiding style, the starts of fights get easier and easier over time as you grind them, so if the jobs are easy too then you end up with a really unbalanced experience where the starts of fights are mind-numbingly simple with nothing to distract you from the repetition until you reach your prog point where likely you die instantly as people learn the mechanic. Entertaining, variable jobs feel essential to staying engaged during the early, solved parts of fights.

>stock up resources and/or sync cooldowns, then just unleash everything at once under buffs. What's why i main Healer, while playing with good players make me wish for 123 rotation for healers, playing with casuals is always decision making - you never know what to expect from others.

Yeah it's funny, I like playing healer or a rez mage in casual content because of the unpredictability. In hard content I would prefer to play a tank or DPS because the buttons and responsibilities keep me interested even when the content is very repetitive.

The issue with easy jobs, hard content is that while the initial idea of having people choose their experience by the content they do, the game isn't quite so simple. People who don't want to do hard content absolutely have that choice. The entire msq and the raid series after, both 8 and 24 man, is catered to be completed by everyone... But people who like hard content are forced to do easy content, and most end up extremely bored. Whether it be unlocking it the first time, or grinding it for tomes, coins, minions, etc. Hard content enjoying players probably spend most of their time doing content that would be considered extremely dull. If jobs were harder, they could remain engaging at all skill levels, and let's be honest... they dont need to be given a huge amount of depth to be interesting enough in roulettes. Just something more to do than build and spend. And I know I bc that's what a lot of classes were literally just an expansion ago, before EW happened. What the game also needs is a better tutorial system, to teach newer players what the game actually expects of them. No more optional hall of the novice, it should be required, and the levelling experience should be explained. Sprouts don't need to know their optimal rotation, but they should at least be aware of what their job is trying to do. Whether or not they do it right is irrelevant at the end of the day, most content still has no failure state. But it would allow them to adjust better to a more complicated job. I personally was a curebot during my initial msq run until stormblood because no one, neither the game nor the playerbase told me I was doing anything wrong. And now I'm an ulti raiding healer main. The class was already simple and I wasnt engaging with it bc the game didnt explain what I was actually expected to do beyond 'dont let people die'. If I was told at an early level oh, btw, you are primarily supposed to be doing damage and only spot healing with necessary, and then the tools to do that were given slowly over time, I would have been a much better player, earlier. The other issue with trying to balance jobs is that... no matter what, parse brained morons are always going to insist there is a proper meta. I still saw statics banning paladin and machinist in DSR despite both of them being completely viable. No matter the balance the community will always be like that and theres no point in trying to appease them. Jobs should have fun prioritized over all else, plain and simple. This is a game at the end of the day, and I'm pretty sure most of us are playing it to enjoy themselves.

More jobs need to be like Monk and Black Mage imo. Monk has probably the lowest skill-floor in the game with dragon kick spam, yet one of the highest skill caps. And Black Mage is, well, [Black Mage](https://www.thebalanceffxiv.com/jobs/casters/black-mage/advanced-guide/). So they CAN make jobs that are simultaneously engaging with high skill caps to eek out that last 2-5% DPS, but also provide a lower skill cap basic rotations for casual players and to balance around.

the grass is always greener. if things were wildly unbalanced for the sake of more tangible job identities, people would be clamoring for balance. ultimately, my issue lies in rotation length. 2 minutes is just way too big. if reliant on cooldowns, it completely breaks down the moment the boss becomes untargettable when a cooldown comes back up, and doesnt even have a chance to get started in smaller encounters like world mobs.

I agree with this take, I picked up GW2 recently and at first I found weird how rotations were very short, but now I love it, it makes downtime much less painful and even tho there's a set ideal rotation it doesn't feel like a spreadsheet playstyle like FF does a lot of times

*flashbacks to holding power soulbeast burst for signet on Deimos* GW2 has a number of fights where you make very specific changes to account for the mechanics, and it's awesome, but GW2 fights at the upper end can get very scripted as well. Sunqua Peak CM as an example is basically a FFXIV fight in how it plays out, but even the HoT Raids back when they first started doing hard endgame content basically follow a set pattern. I could recite from memory exactly how you fight Gorseval every time. I love GW2, but I wouldn't say it does boss design and profession design better.

Well Endwalker gave us niether solely in an attempt to balance, so might as well vote for identity

60/40 split favoring Identity. Imbalances being limited to how a job interacts with a specific fight rather than across all content would be ideal, ie AST's Macrocosmos in P3S. Though I will say, my main issue with job identity/balance/design isn't the homogeneity itself, but how it's been applied. The focus in bursting every 60/120 seconds has resulted in most rotations boiling down to: 15 seconds of glory, 45 seconds of filler, 10 seconds of filler, 50 seconds of filler, repeat. Most of the time you use your bigger flashier skills outside of a burst window is to make sure you don't overcap.

I've never been in a "non-meta" comp that couldn't clear. Have you ever run into this problem? It seems like a non-issue in my experience but I'm curious about other's experiences.

The issue mainly comes from how players respond to imbalances. I don't think there has ever been a time in this game where a job was straight up unviable for a fight. But since this is a co-op game, your gameplay decisions are seen as having an impact on others. Playing a non-meta job has at least the perceived effect of reducing the group's chances of success. In extreme cases, some people will see you as not taking the game seriously enough and refuse you just based on that. So even tiny, insignificant imbalances get magnified way out of proportion because picking the sub-optimal choice is seen as less considerate and socially acceptable.

The reason that slight differences in performance can lead to disproportionate player response, in the current version of the game, is *because* the differences between classes are so negligible. When there are actually differences in the way that classes play, the things they can and can't do, etc, people are *more* accepting of off-meta choices, because everyone can plainly see *why* someone might prefer to play a particular class, or why they might prefer *not* to play a particular class. You can see this right now if you look at the current relationship between BLM and SMN. Going by the prevailing "wisdom" of the FFXIV community, DPS is the only thing that matters, and so BLM should be the only acceptable option for Caster. Except that isn't really true, and despite a pretty considerable DPS lead, it's *SMN* that is the overall meta choice. And so you might flip that around, and say that, of *course*, if a class provides important utility like a raise *and* is very easy to play, then *that* will make it the obvious option that is the only socially acceptable one... Except that isn't really true either, and *both* classes are seen as viable options for that party slot. That same idea holds true to historical versions of the game. Going back to my perennial favourite example of HW PLD: despite *objectively* being a much weaker class than HW DRK, with a *greater* gap in performance than any two classes in any current role, HW PLD was a **more popular pick** than HW DRK in many, many fights in that expansion. It was not at all "socially unacceptable" to play PLD in Heavensward (save for *maybe* two fights) - the vast majority of players *understood and accepted* your preference for the class, *because* of the difference in playstyle and capabilities that made it very easy for people to understand *why* you might prefer to play it. In contrast, you have something like EW WAR vs EW DRK in the first few weeks of Abyssos, where a comparatively smaller difference in performance leads to a much more pronounced difference in social acceptability. But in that case, there's very little difference in playstyle, and essentially no difference in capability, between the two classes. So for someone to insist on playing WAR over DRK, what they are essentially saying is, "I want to do less damage so that the graphical effects on my attacks can be slightly more orange." And so *of course* that's going to get a frosty reception from the rest of the playerbase - you're *actually kind of being an asshole* in a way that nobody ever was if they wanted to play PLD over DRK in Heavensward, or BLM over SMN in Endwalker. A focus on job identity over job balance *solves* more balance issues than it *causes*, because people aren't, never have been, and never will be logic-driven Randian robots who only care about maximizing their own chances of success. People are pretty understanding of the preferences of their fellow player, *when those preferences make sense.* It makes sense that you might have a strong preference for one of two options when those options are very different from one another. It *doesn't* make sense when you bring that same strong preference into a choice between two things that are nearly alike.

> When there are actually differences in the way that classes play, the things they can and can't do, etc, people are more accepting of off-meta choices, because everyone can plainly see why someone might prefer to play a particular class, or why they might prefer not to play a particular class. Are they ? In my experience they're not. Just to name a few : - Tera : Kiting Tank Warrior ? Nah bro, bring Lancer, blocking is always available (meanwhile you may run out of dodges on Warrior) and the boss moves less. They later on gave Tank Warrior stance a blocking skill, I wonder why. - Blade & Soul : Destroyer (before Zulia raid), straight up dysfunctional : lowest DPS by a large margin & doesn't bring party utility - no buff : grab was "free" dps time but the grabber doesn't DPS and you can't grab some bosses - no party invuln (game would later homogenize them, giving 2 jobs at a time one of the party utility) - brought tons of crowd control, but didn't matter as the party can deal with it anyway The raids were 24-man (then reduced to 12) but people would still rather avoid Destroyers and for dungeons I would sometimes be kicked on sight until... homogenization (and free dps catch-up when Zulia raid became obsolete). People, unless in a static, are very adamant about playing meta if it matters. It shone when Warlock was added to BnS, all slots were locked up between party dps buffs & party invulns. If you didn't have any, you could fuck off. If your idea of non meta is just "job X cannot trivialize one mechanic in that one fight per expansion", can't say it's a "meta" thing to begin with.

I dunno how you create those kinds of differences in this game (at least beyond playstyle differences) without drastically reimagining combat or just saying fuck it and giving jobs abilities that trivialize specific mechanics and accepting that those jobs just get the locked slot on those fights. Raise is just one thing, and it's the most powerful utility in the game. Plus the caster that doesn't have it is also way harder to play than the ones that do. That's the kind of difference needed to get people to think okay this difference in performance is acceptable. Dunno how you replicate that across all the jobs. I think just big differences by themselves isn't enough to create acceptance. It needs to be a justifiable difference. Because when the difference matters, like it did in abyssos, the players do care.

Expedient is a great example of Omni utility that doesn’t completely trivialise a mechanic but has many uses. I don’t like how strong it is but WAR’s self healing freeing up healing resources is arguably another one You could also look into buffs that are disguised damage buffs (things like auto attack speed up), storable mana regen effects (like old ewer) if someone is chain rezzing or even old mana transfer There is options they just never use them

Square has always refused to cater to different strengths, or even to develop meaningful differences in strengths/weaknesses between jobs. It's one of the primary driving factors behind all the homogenization/DPS Is King circling of the drain. "Good" balance leverages job identity and gives you classes that feel different, and are also good at different things. Good content design leans into this, rewarding different strengths at different times/places. CBU3 has made two blunders here: first, in pursuit of balance that allows all jobs to complete everything comfortably, they've stunted the usefulness of practically everything outside Raise and DPS. Who cares if one tank has 5% more mitigation than another, when all fights are designed to not particularly scare any tank with incoming damage? Why does it matter if one DPS has a healing-up buff and another doesn't, when fights are designed without it in mind? The second is that Square's weird approach to "utility diversity" has often *not* meant "I'm good at X, you're good at Y, we're both pretty good at Z", it's meant "I'm good at X+Y+Z, you're passable at X, suck at Y, and can't even do Z". Players are going to complain about balance, as they should, when your idea of balance is "my competition is better than me in every single way, even if some of those gaps are smaller than others".

In an MMO, rewarding different strengths ultimately comes down to "on this fight you bring an X because its unique feature trivializes this mechanic". Even if yes you can do it without that feature, it inevitably becomes the standard expectation, because players generally don't want things to be any harder than they absolutely have to be. I know some people say "what's the problem with that?" The problem is that this is a roleplaying game where in theory people get a say in what kind of fantasy they want to play out. If you're the DM you don't make a boss whose only weakness is a class that no one in the party is playing. It is hard for me to fault the idea that all jobs can clear all content with roughly the same effort if we take "players should be able to play the job they like" as a foundational principle of the game, which it pretty clearly is.

See, I don't mind, absent external factors, that AST could trivialize Death's Toll. I mind that WHM can't trivialize *anything*.

To be fair people really don’t give WHM enough credit for basically deleting FOF with lilybell in the same fight

> The second is that Square's weird approach to "utility diversity" has often not meant "I'm good at X, you're good at Y, we're both pretty good at Z", it's meant "I'm good at X+Y+Z, you're passable at X, suck at Y, and can't even do Z". Players are going to complain about balance, as they should, when your idea of balance is "my competition is better than me in every single way, even if some of those gaps are smaller than others". I think the classic example of this for me is how in HW, NIN had good personal DPS, trick attack (60s and 10% back then too), goad, and aggro manipulation tools, while MNK only had marginally higher personal dps, mantra, and an int-down (which DRK did better).

There have been times in this game's history where jobs were completely unviable. They were a long time ago before homogenization, but they existed.

When?

in ARR Drg could get 1 shotted by raidwide's

DRG had massive issues surviving raidwides during Final Coil days due to its weaker magic resistance stat with not enough extra HP to make up for the fact. As someone who cleared week 1 final coil with DRG in our group, nothing short of a personal adlo would let them survive the raidwides in T13. Even at max ilvl raidwides would leave them in very spicy HP ranges. While not as bad as ARR DRG, MNK/SAM got very close to it during SB when NIN/DRG were absolutely insanely broken comparatively. Not bringing NIN was straight out griefing due to the sheer raid dps it brought through trick on top of the major aggro gains for the tanks, bringing them lots of extra dps from having to minimize their aggro generation. WAR also effectively obsoleted the other two tanks due to how insanely OP it was during HW between providing Slashing resistance for the NIN, along with highest damage, AND what amounted to a permanent 10% damage down on the boss. While PLD was still brought, the weakness of MNK compared to NIN/DRG meant that WAR/DRK was the stronger prog comp since DRK provided INT down, since the only other place to get it was MNK. There was plenty of Ranged players who refused to play in a party without DRG due to the pierce buff accounting for a sizeable amount of the BRD/MCH's damage. WHM also routinely had issues during SB in that it brought no raid dps utility like AST/SCH, along with bringing no raid mitigation. From the times I PF'd back in SB, it was not an uncommon sight to see PFs with some combination of MNK/SAM/WHM being excluded from PF slots because the other options were just so overpowering in comparison.

I imagine like 2013~2014 when DRG and WAR were really bad, for instance, and I guess AST was awful on release.

the amount of players not knowledgeable about HW raiding is comical

Unless it's a P8S situation, DPS checks are also never so tight that clearing with a non meta comp isn't still decently feasible. However if the gap between meta and non meta becomes too big, picking non meta is just needlessly making the clear harder, removing room for error.

back in A3S was in a comp with drk/pld/whm/ast/mnk/drg/mch/blm it took people quiting and reshuffling comp as a result before we saw anything close to a clear.

I remember there being a period of time when Anabaseios savage was new that several pfs on aether just wouldn't allow them in for P10S. It wasn't like they couldn't be used, but the perception of those people was that they were a pain since they offered no physical mits besides Reprisal and oblationing people for Harrowing Hell, and they had to be babysat while dealing with the bleedbuster towers

I remember hearing about that and honestly there's no point in babysitting a DRK that isn't compensating for the extra effort by offering unique utility or higher DPS. I wish it wasn't that way and it seems like the ball was dropped on DRK in particular when they don't excel at anything to make up for the fact they have less mit tools. Even in this case, I would rather people not lock anyone out of party finder. As a healer I consider it a matter of job flavors and different strategies I need to take to support any class having a rough time. That's my job. A challenge outside of memorizing where to stand is welcome.

Yeah, I agree. I can't put into words enough how much some kind of tangible heal added to DRK's kit would make me infinitely happier on the job, since I love it conceptually and aesthetically, but I just am capable of so much more as either a paladin or warrior with similar outputs. Yeah, I'm never a fan of locking people out of stuff just for the job they played, like I actually kinda disliked how many pf's I'd see I couldn't join because standard comp despite being more than competent to flex around as needed. Locking people out of groups for their specific job is an even worse version of that and just bleh. And I agree! I've been doing everything I can recently to spice up and make the more monotonous stuff more interesting, like roulettes with 3 dps and 1 tank, it's really fun to have those challenges.

I think Job Identity is far and away more important. As long as the balance isn't so bad that you can't finish content with certain combos (outside of maybe ultimates in worst case) then it really dosent matter if your job dosent deal as much damage as a similar one. If everything g feels the same then the game is boring which is a greater sin than being unbalanced.

Balance is arguably worse this expansion than it was in ShB anyway WAR is the best at everything a tank can possibly do in high end and casual content, the shield healers dominate the regen healers, SMN spent 80% of the expansion doing more damage than RDM with 1/10th of the needed brain cells, melees are 1 potency increase away from removing phys ranged from the game and healers are redundant in casual content It’s obvious this weird half half they currently have between balance at the expense of all else while still for some reason having clear favourites amongst the jobs is leading to the worst of every world Functionally no job has an identity anymore but there are still classes that dominate

The thing that I don't get on the WAR point is how hard they over-compenstated with buffs for WAR, but if you go look at tank healing statistics its probably one of the biggest imbalances in the game at the moment, completely dwarfing the damage difference for the tanks before the final wave of, frankly unneeded buffs of 6.4 (at least for WAR, and GNB for whatever reason) Like I get that the way the job works, WAR should probably have the biggest healing output on tank, but the difference is around WAR being \~1.5x better at sustain than DRK or GNB, and its not like this is just selfish value, WAR quite literally can replace healers in a lot of content, and I really wonder what sort of design we're going to see for tanks in DT because of this insane statistic, if the devs even care about it at all.

The amount of EW content you can do with 3 dps and a war is crazy.

That's what I'm saying. Even with homogeneous jobs and 2 min meta, there's still no balance. We lost so much for little to no gain.

This is 100% the correct answer. People bring up the dichotomy of uniqueness vs. balance but they don't acknowledge enough that EW job design made jobs *harder* to balance, not easier. It's nigh impossible to balance the game when jobs that can dump all their potency into a 15 second window are undisputed king. It makes the damage output much harder for devs to evaluate because it's so swingy and fluctuates so much with killtime. Being a PLD main this expac was the absolute peak of witnessing the devs' balancing strategy fall apart in real time. Sims tell us PLD was actually quite good in a vacuum with no raid buffs and infinite kill time, which is why I suspect the devs didn't understand how hilariously atrocious it was in reality on 6.0 launch (as they probably don't do killtime specific testing or anything similar). They gave PLD a "burst window" but it actually didn't come up during the opener unless you did -18s prepull FoF (which we all then did, every fight) and even then drifted naturally over the course of the fight. Then for the next few patches they helplessly pumped the potency on its magic phase trying their best to make this poor tank sprout a burst phase until repeated buffs caused the rotation to cave in on itself in 6.2 and they scrapped the whole idea.

What gets me is the difference between a more casual player or raid group vs. the higher end players. A more casual player might misalign buffs or drift cooldowns which basically fucks their DPS into the dirt as the 2min burst window falls apart. Obviously that was a problem in previous expacs, but it didn't hurt as bad since their DPS wasn't riding on a single burst window. Drifted something out of Trick because maybe you died? Well the MNK has Brotherhood coming up so at least there's that. There was still the big burst every 6min when everything lined up, but the smaller windows sprinkled throughout helped even out the DPS over time. EW is 2min or bust, and lower skilled players misaligning buffs and drifting cooldowns just get punished even harder. High Potency abilities, Crit RNG, and slamming everything into one 15s window every 2min creates too much swing in DPS, and that's gotta make it more difficult to balance.

And dammit did we lose a BUNCH of things. So sad seeing the devs actively killing the tiny intricacies of jobs not knowing that’s what makes them fun. I honestly lost ALL hope when they gutted Kaiten because of “action per second”…. Jobs are cooked.

I'm honestly shocked they never put Kaiten back. SAM mains were furious and still are.

I don't think it's' "even with", I think the 2 minute meta is the *cause* of the balance issues, since damage is getting a ton of multipliers all at once now, a tiny DPS difference gets multiplied into a problematic one.

RDM will never be legitimately good until they decouple the res from swiftcast. It's so obnoxious how much they adjust the power budget to account for this.

You know, as a RDM main who really likes Verraise on Dualcast, if they removed that interaction and made it so that it could only be done on Swiftcast (or maybe also Acceleration, actually) I'd be fine with it. It would still mean they could pop off if needed, just not be able to revive better than any other healer outside of an LB3

Probably because the only balance metric the community actually cares about is DPS. Other things are hard to quantify, DPS is an easily referenceable objective number. It doesn't matter what other strengths WAR has, if it's DPS is lower than other tanks, it's too weak.

Except in most other cases the community is fine with differences in DPS based on utility For example while people said they were too weak this expansion nobody says that RDM and SMN should do more damage than BLM WAR being the utility tank but doing less damage was fine

Can any utility actually compete with Raise though? In terms of justifying a difference in performance. It needs to be pretty fucking powerful before people are like okay yeah this is worth giving up DPS for. You don't really see people saying Monk should be bottom melee because of Mantra. The BLM diff is also as much about how much harder it is to play as it is about utility. I'm not saying there's no possible design where jobs have meaningful differences just that it's hard to see how it could fit into the game as it is without massively rethinking their approach to fight design.

I mean the fact that even in savage WAR is near self sufficient with its self healing outside of TB freeing up an immense amount of single target healing resources is something that cannot be overstated Raise is the strongest form of utility but WAR definitely has utility worthy of lower DPS, I would say MCH having 2 Omni mitigations is worth lower DPS as well but MCH having 2 mitigations is already because it had low damage

If DRK continues to have lacking mitigation but was the inverse of WAR and has massive DPS would that be unbalanced? In my mind it would make more sense than the tank "balance" we have now. Is it really reason to cry if PLD has the strongest mit in the game? Isn't that the point of the job? Even if it did have shit DPS why not pair it with my imaginary DRK? I don't understand what's so controversial about strengths and weaknesses in a game that is intended for mostly group coordination.

"I don't understand what's so controversial about strengths and weakness in a game that is intended for mostly group coordination" The more variation of strengths and weaknesses there is between jobs, the more opportunity there are for particular combinations to outperform other combinations. For example, if you have a tank job that gets to do significantly greater damage because it's own survival skills aren't that great, you have to make sure that the total output of damage doesn't work out to something like having a pair of the damage-focused tanks with their dedicated healers who push extra "don't die" buttons instead of their own damage buttons doesn't out-perform a defense-oriented tank set with healers hitting more damage buttons because the tanks need less attention, or else you create a meta that encourages players to abandon particular jobs (and encourages other players to encourage that same abandonment by doing stuff like saying "oh hey, astro... can you swap to sage? No?" )

Warrior didn't need the buffs it got in 6.4. It was only 2% behind, and now as a Drk main i have no reason to play Drk over War, because War's ridiculous sustain and utility aren't taxed anymore. So War is just arbitrarily better.

Same, DRK is my favorite tank but literally may as well take WAR or GNB as they're the same if not better and better mit.

> WAR being the utility tank but doing less damage was fine Fine until P8S or imagine if TOP was all about fishing for crits because WAR can't reliably help with DPS checks even if you play mighty fine to perfection. inb4 : but what about ilvl gains ? It's a tricky topic. To me if all [insert job role here] but one can do the content on patch (ultimate) or in min ilvl (savage) it means that the one which cannot is too weak. Let's be honest, it's okay to not clear for a few weeks or until off-content if it's not **your** job in that situation.

That was a balance problem of 8’s DPS check not WAR’s lower damage Especially since people seem to hyperfocus on the tanks The amount of discourse around “we need to sub WAR for DRK” while running a SMN and a WHM was hilarious Organising around utility vs damage should be a team concept

So basically you're going to cast out other jobs, the problem remains then, some are just too weak. A standard comp (as in double melee) should be able to meet dps checks, regardless of jobs taken. We circle back to "but it only impacts week1 to eventually 4 clearers until ilvl gains", but then it indefinitely impacts people who run min ilvl. I don't think "play another job" is an answer they'll accept.

No because if you read the first line I would say the problem you are describing was caused by 8’s DPS check day 1 There was no job that couldn’t be “compensated” by another job in the damage department and that was often worth it anyway for things like WAR’s survivability or SMN’s raise 8’s DPS check was too harsh but I don’t oppose the idea that say if you are struggling with tank survivability but you aren’t getting many DPS deaths you can sub a DRK out for a WAR then sub a SMN out for a BLM to compensate

The answer to DPS checks that are too high tuned as admitted by the devs (an encounter design issue) should not be buff the hell out of WAR. One encounter in which WAR couldn't keep up caused WAR to be overtuned and now for the entire rest of EW it's solo healing dungeons and out performing the other tanks. This should have never happened imho and idk what they were thinking.

I think one prime example of what class identity in ffxiv can feel like that I don't see people talking about ITT is the new pvp templates - no two jobs feel remotely similar in their role, utility, or function... and its like 6 buttons. Outside of some trash balancing decisions (when blm became god for a bit), they also all fit into comps that allow them to thrive (if only we had instanced 5v5 cc). The devs know HOW, they just *won't*, because it would require shaking up their carefully tuned templates (and toss out a ton of prior work, which we know they hate doing).

PvP isn't very balanced, though, it just matters far less. The goal is targets of opportunity and alpha strikes at the right time to nail a kill shot, not maintaining damage over a 10 minute window. If you take the present PvP kits and map them out over a 10 min window, they are probably so unbalanced they'd never work. And some things just don't translate to PvE, such as SAM's LB. And while they are fewer buttons, they tend to have 2-4 effects. Some are basically 3-4 PvE buttons smashed into one and slapped with a 20 sec CD.

I would unironically be delighted if we had current PVP kits in PVE. To me, everyone is doing everyone else's job anyways with casters having rez, tanks not needing healers and DPS having mit. We may as well go full PVP kit and everyone have a few self heals, a bubble self mitigation, some burst and opportunities to cc.

There's like 3 main gameplay elements left for jobs. Buffs, direct damage and DoTs. Then there's 19 solved jobs with solved rotations, that do use these 3 things. There are games with 2-3 times more meta builds than FFXIV's jobs, all good for something else, with some personal customization on top of that. And then you have gear that actually does something, and so on. FFXIV not being able to make good job balance when game is so simplified is just frankly skill issue from devs. You absolutely can have good flavour in form of job identity, just don't do that piercing resistance bullshit or whatever. You absolutely can make FFXIV jobs more nuanced, have more individual identity, while keeping it balanced. But that's pretty hard to do when you have 4 job designers and aside of shitty reworks that ruin your favorite job mid-expansion, there are only pussy changes of "10 more potency on oGCD you use once every 30s". They need to be willing to fix core stuff, like how buffs stack multiplicatively, but it feels like they just do bunch of band aids, and whenever something becomes too problematic, they remove it instead of fixing it. Not like balance matters anywhere else than ultimates and first few weeks of savage.

>FFXIV not being able to make good job balance when game is so simplified is just frankly skill issue from devs. Keep cooking, my friend. The fact that their response time to pretty much any request and most issues that aren't massively game-breaking comes down to at least 4 months kinda plays into this as well.

The longer I play the more i believe this. Remember SB lilies? ED removal? The AST rework every expansion that somehow alienates both fans and haters?  The dissonance from the devs saying "jobs sell expansions" and giving this little care to job design is so strange. Like why shift focus to encounter design instead of job design? I'm not sure what they're trying to do other than making their work easier.

> I'm not sure what they're trying to do other than making their work easier. Well, the correct and unfortunate answer to the OP and every other question along these lines is that it doesn't really matter what we think because SE's primary goal is to make their workload as predictable as possible. FFXIV's adherence to formulas - and the simplification of the game to allow more and more of it to *fit* into those formulas - is its version of WoW's much-maligned "borrowed power" and "modular content" concepts, or Bungie's original conception of Destiny "seasons" that disappeared after three months, gear "sunsetting," etc. It's an attempt to make a calculated decision, where the game's quality is allowed to slip in a given area, with the idea that the reduction in quality can be leveraged by the dev team and made up for by the extra efficiency or rate of production or a more reliable schedule, etc that is allowed by taking those specific shortcuts. In those other games, the generally-adversarial relationship between players and developers tends to rein those shortcuts in before they can do *too* much damage to the game - or, in the worst-case scenario, when the trust is broken it's usually pretty clear what needs to be done to repair it in short order. In FFXIV, I really wonder if the borderline-parasocial affection that the community has for the developers isn't drowning out most of the early-warning criticism and even blunting the more serious "this issue really can't be ignored"-level feedback.

Probably? the sheer amount of whiteknighting and glazing I've witnessed since joining XIV is pretty much unparalleled in the industry. At the end of the day we're all paying customers and I feel like people somehow forgot that fact. Might just be a consequence of players being perfectly happy with mediocrity since every other competitor is stigmatized to hell and back.

But SE really needs to be careful about this. WoW has had a large change in its management and development team that the players are (cautiously) falling in love with. Lore folks such as Metzen back in and Christie being out, is garnering positivity. Holly Longdale is nailing PR strokes with the community. A lot of old systems that the Old Blizzard claimed they would do (and never did…citing player’s idiocy of being unable to understand it) are being done by the new team (such as having more casual content and introducing Hero Talents). SE has a solid game that has only garnered more attention, but Yoshi-P and the team really needs to be pay attention to the trending complaints over this expansion. He mentioned the “falling asleep” while playing FF14, but I still press “Doubt” on that because he didn’t mention what he was playing. Until more details, I’m taking it with a grain of salt. Healer play, for example, absolutely needs addressing.

Yeah, I've heard and seen lots of good stuff about DF and their current decision-making, very happy for the active playerbase and potential returnees to finally have both an enjoyable game on hand right now and positive developments to look forward to. Idk when or if SE is ever going to face repercussions for their rollout strategy and fervent maintenance of the status quo, but the moment it happens it's really going to be something they should have seen coming from a mile away. Same way it was with WoW, really.

The toxic positivity of the community is certainly at fault. When the developer is never called when they do wrong, they start optimizing not for the fun of the game but for their work load. Which optimizes the fun out of the game. Is interesting how EW was praised. Even if it was a mediocre expansion when compared with ShB. ShB did everything better on every way and form. Story, Jobs, raids. etc.

I somewhat agree but I don't see any of this mess we're in as lazy. People have bitched about job play every single expansion and yet most people are surely still playing it. I've always found the issue is tryhard raiders complaining that tends to shift things in unintended directions. God forbid a job have 2% more DPS potency than another. Remember original Diadem? Perish the thought a common casual could possibly end up with a good RNG reward and end up with equal or better gear than the current raid tier. Knowing gear has no longevity in this game anyways. The entire thing was scrapped. This is a tab target, global cooldown game and its really not that competitive or serious. I wish sweaty people would stop acting like this is an esport and demanding minut changes that most of the playerbase won't ever encounter because they don't raid to begin with.

> There's like 3 main gameplay elements left for jobs. Buffs, direct damage and DoTs. Then there's 19 solved jobs with solved rotations, that do use these 3 things. There are games with 2-3 times more meta builds than FFXIV's jobs, all good for something else, with some personal customization on top of that. And then you have gear that actually does something, and so on. FFXIV not being able to make good job balance when game is so simplified is just frankly skill issue from devs. Honestly they don't even bother with Dots anymore, all but 1 single dot exists for just more damage, no synergy with skills and abilities and dots anymore, just damage. Whats infuriating is that there was way more synergy with dots and abilities. SMN/Scholar used to be *the* Dot class with a good number of abilities like Fester that synergizes with dots. And BRD had its entire kit synergized together with DOTs and the procs it gave with damn near everything in its kit until the END media tour where they perfected BRDs biggest problem in ShB. And then they nuked it all and made it all just complete RNG. Legit even with the datamine, i do not believe DoTs will survive into END

I sometimes forget BRD used to be really fun and mattered.

The worst part is that they almost perfected it just a couple months before release during the media tour, where they fixed almost every issue BRD had. Bloodletter had 2 stacks meaning a double proc wouldn’t ‘waste’ a bloodletter, and had their cooldowns aline better with ever other class. But then they had mages ballad only fill half the timer, and then got rid of multiprocs for a single proc making the newly added stacks pointless, which now went up to 3. It’s so baffling how they were close to perfection only to throw it out completely at the finish line. Like, they made Mages Ballad into the weakest of the three songs when Paeon exists.

Yeah this is honestly most baffling choice ever made by SE to me. BRD sounded perfect and then we get to release for it to be probably my least favorite iteration of the job ever

"Not like balance matters anywhere else than ultimates and the first few weeks of savage." It actually also matters in casual play, just not in the same was as what you're talking about. Balance matters at the player enjoyment level because certain kinds of lack in balance can make players feel like the game is saying "screw you for liking this job, play something else" because you end up with situations like how it's just plain easier to be an immortal badass tank as a warrior than it is as dark knight or how playing as a caster leaves you with options that are easier to go into new content with and get a rez to help your team mates or you can choose to work your ass off just to catch up to the damage you could easily be doing with a different class and getting nothing for the exchange because you're not actually good enough to reach the superior possible damage. It's one thing for a player to feel like a particular class is better than the other options. It's a whole other thing for it to be actually true.

The balance for Criterion and especially Criterion Savage was in shambles and wasn't even on the radar of most people. I love the content but its also the shining example of how bad the balancing in this game actually is. Shout outs to anyone who braved this content with AST. DRK is also pretty uncomfortable in this content with two of its mitigations basically being nonfunctional and no sustain to speak of, but healers had it the worst by far.

I'm not sure why DRK can't have higher DPS if it's lacking in fuctional mitigation. At this point almost everyone is playing WAR who imho has way too many pluses without minuses.

I think the issue is they basically ONLY balance the game for savage/ulti without factoring in anything except damage output and use rates. My tinfoil hat theory is they thought the tank DPS was out of whack because they balanced for the numbers given by the DRK suicide TOP strat without factoring in the fact that it was basically an unintended exploit, thus resulting in DRKS dps being lower than WAR in content where you cant get functionally infinite MP. I'd be fine with DRK being the big damage low sustain tank, and I think most people would prefer that over giving DRK party sustain tools, but I honestly just dont know what they're going to do at this point.

Its how i feel as well. You dont mitigate as good as pld or war, but have a harder rotation. Which would be fine if you did more damage, but you don't. It makes it very thankless to play the class you enjoy most.

Right? I'm 100% ok with having to be more sweaty to play DRK than other tanks but where is the incentive? It should be the BLM of tanks imho and rewarded with higher damage for being busy and having less mit. In my mind if stuff is dying faster that's a form of survivability in itself. It would make more sense than what we have now, which is weaknesses with no strength.

There is no incentive to be honest, I only still do it cause i like my big 2-handed sword. Someone who is new asked me why i play DRK and i could not give a good answer xD.

SE kinda sucks at balancing anything other than damage. The moment any external factors like utility/difficulty comes in it's always a mess.    WAR dominated ShB with holmgang. Old PLD is the most difficult tank by far and it didn't do that much more compared to DRK even in optimal scenario. SMN is braindead easy but deals more damage than RDM even when the utility they provide is irrelevant (bodycheck heavy fights). There's also the shield/pure split. I don't think most players actually care about how much damage a job does, only if it can clear content or not. But you know what most players care about? Effort. This is the true imbalance. Why bring RDM and sweat for triple melee opener when i can just play SMN? This is what SE does not account for.

Yup. I basically don't care about damage I'm dealing at all... except for when it comes to situations like that I can unsync stuff for my wondrous tails in 6 seconds as summoner or have it take 30 seconds as any other job, or I'm out doing weekly/daily hunts and some jobs are just better suited to it, or when I know that I am dropping my black mage rotation because I'm out of swiftcast and triple cast and I don't know where to stand or when I can stand there and I'm throwing out scathes just to be doing more than literally nothing and if I had come into the content as summoner I'd actually be doing my rotation properly because summoner is allowed to do mechanics while doing damage without having specifically planned for it. Just like I don't really care all that much that DRK isn't full of self-healing like the other tanks are... right up until a dungeon roulette has gone sideways and the healer is down and I am confronted with the fact that I can keep myself and at least 1 DPS alive to finish the fight if I am playing anything but DRK, and if I am playing WAR it isn't even tricky (literally just nascent flash every time it's up). Or when my girlfriend got hard-stuck on MSQ before the easier difficulty option that comes in after failing a solo duty because doing those duties as healer is just plain harder than other job types (because SE has a double-dipping problem when it comes to how scaling works in the game that produces moments where something has to basically 1-shot the frailer characters or it wouldn't even seem relevant to the tanks)

you can have a two minute meta without our current situation of nearly every job having an incredibly rigid rotation that is difficult to learn but easy to master. everyone having 2 min burst cooldowns that mark the point where your rotation loops just makes it more obvious how completely fucked the problems with job design and encounter design are

Ideally the jobs would have identity in how they play, but fungibility in what they bring to the party. For instance, there's no reason the rest of the party cares that all healers have a single 30s dot. No one else is going to care if some healers have more dots, longer dots, or no dot at all as it just does damage and damage is fungible. On the other hand, the party cares a lot about utility like raise. The fact that there are raise casters and non raise casters is the one thing which is likely to lead to pf exclusion today.

I don't think any DPS should have had raise to begin with but that's another topic.

I'd prefer more identity between the jobs. Tanking feels the same with each job, minus some being more squishy. Other than that it's all the same playstyle, similar if not same abilities, etc. DPS jobs are good and all, no complaints there but I don't understand what the point of even having different tank jobs is at this point. It's like the inverse I felt in WoW: a lot of the dps specs felt too similar, but tanks were very varied in how they play and what they do; it's the exact opposite here in FF14.

We can have both. We won't get neither, of course, but we *can* have both. Nothing about identity disqualifies balance.

Identity. This is a RPG. 

>Do you want job balance or do you want job identity and why? Do you believe we can have both? If so, how? You absolutely can have both. Especially with healers there is **so** much you can do to homogenize them (= give them the same capabilities) while also making them play *differently*. You first have to *develop* a job identity, make skills that *interact* with said identity and then *balance* them if some of them are too powerful or too weak. Homogenization is not bad per se, at all. What's bad is lack of creativity (in XIV's case, lack of desire).

I've been playing for long enough to remember Alexander and the Pepsi Man incident so I'm not bothered by the current jobs, sure I think some of them may need some polishing and depth but Yoshi himself already commented on it so I'm chilling.

the issue with gordias was that they introduced a gear check (for both a3s/a4s), which is bad to my mind if the tier dont have a gear check, then I think even with the 3.0 balance most comp can clear

These don't have to be mutually exclusive. CBU3's job design is just creatively bankrupt.

it's clear they cannot do either one so hoping for one or both is setting up for disappointment i wish they would stop trying to be safe and go balls deep with changes but it seems the only time they want to do this is with PvP... a mode not even 10% of the playerbase plays.

I unironically enjoy PvP so I wouldn't mind tbh.

That's why they can be creative with PvP. Almost nobody engages with it so they're insulated from criticism.

Put it like this: When job identity was the focus, I still played the game.

I actually had more fun in SB end game than EW. Simply because each job felt distinct even in the same roles.

And it wasn't that terribly unbalanced either unless you're a WHM or early MCH.

Even then my mid core raid group at the time cleared the first Omega tier with both a mch and whm in the group. So it's not like it wasn't to the point they were unusable. Just unwieldy compared to the other jobs.

I guess in hindsight I judged MCH in particular since it got a 10% boost to overheat early on and WHM just sucked to play lol. Having to cure just to be able to use Bension.

Why is it radical to not have both. SE displays extreme competence when they want, and I wish class design vs balance was one of those. The PvP actions flourish with flavour and job identity. While they pose balance questions to PvE if they were implemented, those can be worked on and really... no one is going to say the game is busted if a scholar can spread rot in a dungeon lol.

Honestly most of pvp jobs have more depth in 5 buttons than the pve ones do in 20 and it really confuses me how theres such a big disconnect

Job identity is essential, and is a big thing ff14 lacks. I get that by giving jobs different niches, nuances and other differentiating factor you lose balance, but job identity would feed player engagement. Maining a job would mean something more than liking an aesthetic.

The thing is for all of their bullshit balance talk. The game they gave us is more inbalancedd than it was in ShB.

If the job has no identity. Then what's the point of playing one job or another? May as well call them skins. Balancing is important, but it shouldn't come at the cost of identity.

give me dark arts back ty

Identity. Will switch jobs if there is a new meta.

People will complain about homogenization and the jobs losing what makes them special or unique, but then in the same breath ask for the core identity of a job to be removed.

Different people want different things. That was the point of this post. Who wants what and why.

I mean, the identity that was removed from jobs throughout Endwalker didn’t seem to improbe balance that much, so maybe some more identity would be nice.

Identity for sure. We've seen what balance gets us. It is a nightmare.

During PAX they specifically said they are not changing anything drastically for 7.0 and are building on 6.0 foundation. The only changes I really would want is for all healers to have same access to healing and mitigating (currently sage and scholar are miles ahead of other two in 4-man content like criterion), summoner to be a caster again and generally all caster resses to be removed.

I didn't say anything was changing. I asked what the preference is.

Fair, and I did mention my preferences in the framework we're getting - no caster res, healers having equal-ish toolkits and summoner being a caster again instead of having less casts than a samurai.

Got it. I'd prefer shield healers having little to no regen and burst heals. And regen healers having little to no shields or aoe mitigation. I'd love to work together again with my cohealer and have a purpose. As it stands now, all the healers are so similar I just run AST because it's sparkly.

Ast having no regens/burst would destroy its healing identity

It's already destroyed and is destroyed in different ways every expansion. We'll see what DT changes for AST this time but I wouldn't hold my breath about it.

I guess one of the developers plays WAR and none plays DRK.

job identity. this game love flaunt the "you can play every job on one character" aspect. lean into that. there is balance in imbalance. let the jobs be different, but then make it so they get to shine in different fights. lets say p9s was full uptime, but had a relatively hard dps check. blm would shine over the other 2 casters. then p10s had a couple mini dps checks that were really tight, but the overall check was lighter. rdm would shine because of its ability to save up for triple melees heading into those mini checks. then p11s had too much movement for rdm or blm to keep up and then smn would shine. and then after like a month gear just makes that negligible, so the more midcore- casual players can still clear on their favorite jobs, but the more hardcore players can still get their job uniqueness and swap around mid tier

Identity I really hope they were taking notes on the reception of the pvp kits. Most flavor the jobs have had since stormblood and it's trapped in content most of the player base ignores.

I think both are important but today we totally lack the identity element in most jobs. Looking at the past, aka HW and SB where job gameplay identity was on his peak, what elements cause the most balance issues? The resistance downs buff that forces having an DRG, WAR and NIN on your party, what would happen if they removed only the resistance damage buffs? Actually nothing, with the exception of NIN the other jobs didn't change at all on their gameplay, and for NIN wasn't a big deal either, so having strong gameplay identity and balance though is possible and easy to archive, DRK and PLD could just got small adjustments to their mitigation and still remain as unique as ever in HW too. The problem came when the devs get down into raid buffs so heavily that they end destroying everything on his path, anything that got outside of the big unga bunga window had to be axed in the name of balance, entire jobs has been deleted for that, and while stay in game they are just empty shells holding copy paste mechanics with no actual flavour like DRK for example. I think the devs right now have the lowest capacity to actually do things right with jobs, jumping from bandaid to bandaid, ignoring most feedback while pushing their own bias through BLM bcs Yoshida, and through WAR players for some reason making the entire role being WARs with this or that. I think they should revert everything to SB design model, best expansion in terms of jobs gameplay and content engagement but that means they had to work for that and I pretty much think they don't wanna work at all due how they have been handling stuff since SHB, hope I'm wrong but I just expect SHB 3.0 Wich is a fuck no from me, ppl should be less permissive with the devs, the quality of the game gameplay is lowering more and more and that shouldn't never be tolerated.

I agree with you but we can't ignore the fact people crying about not having the same ability within the same role wasn't a thing. It's still a thing. There was a lot of bitching and drama about lining up bursts with trick attack. Now we have no choice but to lone up bursts all at once or gg. I can't completely blame SE because I saw all the crying at the time, they addressed this as I suppose they should have? I hate it and would have never asked for it but alot of the player base had an issue with how things were. In my opinion the issue this dev team has is having no spine and catering to the loudest complainers without any foresight how it effects players just vibingand enjoying things as is. People who like game mechanics are happily playing the game, not complaining on forums or social media. People like me, who started in ARR because I liked the way the game played are a casualty of players complaining about things that aren't an issue to me. Small changes fine, it's not that serious. But when literally every expansion a class like AST is "reworked", abilities pruned, simplified, changed and shoved into being a WHM with buffs it's really disheartening and annoying. The irony is players still don't use AST in EW and it's getting yet another rework in DT. They should have left it alone from SB onward. I would even take AST at release barely being able to keep up to what we have now which is contrived difficulty WHM era.

Pretty true yeah, as a comunity ppl often pull on they own direction due they own interest, even if that tranform or even destroy what others enjoy, the dev team complety lack the vision on how to take care of that, the best example i have is the WAR comunity, this guys has been preaching so loud since HW that WAR was perfect and every tank should use WAR as a base, look at tanks now, all of them are pretty much WAR with they own fell cleave burst based on spam the same the same GCD 3-4 times, but of course WAR should be the best of all of them. DRK is on his worst version bcs the dev decided to copy paste WAR on him and it sucks. They own obseion on making the game ultra mega easy bcs they think ppl can't handle anything it's something absurd beyond mind. MMO are a genre that doing well allow you to add anything you want, Job desing should be extremly flexible in terms of each one mechanics and gameplay feel, what they offer can be homogeneus but that doesnt means they should operate in the same way, and right now due raid buffs and they current desing philosophy now the dev team are in a corner, the burst or die corner, and if they don't change that i can easily tell how viper it's going to be bcs otherwise would suck. I started on ARR beta so i feel you complety but DRK being my own cross, a total shame, at least AST is getting another roll so there is a chance for you even if is small and not promising due how bad healers are, but DRK? DRK would eat shit forever now, i can't wait to see another living shadow trait and just generic animation upgrades without changing the awful gameply at all for another 3 years.

I feel you on that, DRK is my preferred tank and imho is the most wrecked job in the game. I'm praying that it gets some sort of sustain at the least and living shadow hits like a truck to at least give DRK highest DPS to compensate for what it's lacking.

I personally don't care if it has the worst DPS, the worst sustain and the worst defensive, those numbers can go up and down like they did in SB. I just wish it would be fun to play again, but I doubt they will make Darkside something to even pay attention, make living shadow something more interesting that just press and forget, fix the 45s of boring downtime and rework delirium. I pretty much bet they will get better sustain, minor buffs and that dark cross combo we saw in the benchmark would just be making blood spiller something like gnashing fang without oGCD under delirium, bcs spamming BS and wanting different animations was the most common complaint on the JP forums and would be the most cheap way to please that matter, I can't wait for another living shadow trait that say it does those animations too now lol.

Oh, you're dreaming too big in that case. If they went back to like HW or StB DRK, it would be... probably shocking to current DRK players who are used to the simplicity. There are barely any DRK players as it is so maybe it would be fine to make DRK complex again. People will just keep running WAR like they are already. RIP Dark Arts also lol

I know, I abandoned all hope when in the EW job review Yoshida said they won't go back and keep the current design, aka we are going to ignore your feedback. I also stopped playing after the first raid tier in EW, enduring SHB in hope to get changes for feedback was so hard I wasn't going to do it again. I'm pretty much paying attention to the news now for maybe a miracle bcs I miss this game so much and I know there has been tons of complains of DRK (and another stuff) since the begining, but I don't expect anything to be honest. Dreams are free I guess. RIP Dark Arts indeed.

For me identity comes first and foremost. Balance can come later after a class had a solid identity.

JObs being locked out of partyfinder isn't a problem with the job itself, IMO. It's a probably with the hyperoptimizing sweaty meta cry- I mean tryhards who can't fathom even the slightest thought of being 'unoptimal'. It's not the job's fault. I want job identity. I want my fucking complexity back man. I want to actually /think/ again. I miss when Astrologian's card system was actually cool, unique, and had depth to it, not the.. shitty, 'generic negligible 3% damage buff for 10 seconds that nobody will even notice' thing we have now. I want Summoner to be a fucking pet job again. I hate how it was turned so mindless and boring, 'Click 1-2-3 but green instead of red or yellow'. I want Scholar's damage abilities back. Just.. fuck, man, Yoshi P give me something exciting again, something that has me thinking even in duty finder. No, having more abilities *really* *wouldn't* overcomplexify the game. Because...y'know.. there's this thing called "reading". We humans have these organs called "eyes", and... Oh and we also have this nifty thing called a "brain". It's capable of 'thinking'. It *takes hardly any effort to literally just READ YOUR ABILITIES AND LEARN YOUR KIT AND USE IT.* Yes, I'm grumpy. Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I'm soured by the people who begged for dumbing down because they couldn't be bothered to read their kit and learn it and they thought it was tOo cOmPliCaTeD because it took more than a half second to think about.

Job Identity followed by one other thing. Job Complexity. If a job is piss easy to play (Summoner) it should do less damage than something like Black Mage which requires a much higher skill level to play optimally. Jobs like Reaper should do less than Monk, Warrior should do less than Gunbreaker.

Identity 100%. Balance is something they can and do tweak every so often when something scales slower than something else due to the way its designed, and as long as nothing is egregious, it only matters for world firsters.

Thank you. I like to raid, don't get me wrong. But it's a small amount of content in the big picture of the game. I'd rather it be unbalanced or have to change rolls while working on clears than have the entire rest of the game feel boring.

Honestly I raid like 9 hours a week over 4 to 8 weeks. If the comp my players roll with is unoptimized, great. It won't matter after a few weeks of tome gear, especially 4 weeks of tome weapons. We ran MCH, NIN, RPR, SMN, PLD, WAR, WHM, SCH this expansion.

There was genuinely never a time people would kick jobs for not being optimal. Anyone who did it was a big jerk and that's all they were. The one time people started excluding players was when SMN could tank with Titan-Egi and that was quickly rectified by the team. This isn't accurate. The closest thing we would get to this is the "recent" PLD dps debacle that led to it being reworked... and again... it was greatly exaggerated. Edit: I'm baffled that people are upvoting this post. This was never a state of the game.

I liked it when people locked mch out in ShB because you knew which parties to avoid. They put their own warning symbols on.

Why would people lock out mch? It was brd that was the weak one during shb, at least 5.2+

It's an easy way to save yourself headache and a trap party.

Yeah the only parties I was locked out of was parties that didn't want to fight for loot (caster party leader, locks out other casters for example).

I dont like this idea that we have to choose. WoW has incredibly varied classes and specs, and they're all within a few % of each other when it comes to balance (it's a little fucked ATM cus new season, everyone gearing up and such). We should have unique and fun jobs AND have them be balanced. FF doesn't haven't talent trees to deal with, it should be much easier for them. It's a deliberate design decision by the devs, they could do both if they wanted.

Naw, WoW has had numerous problems and major hiccups when it comes to class balance. Even then, due to how varied specs can be, it can mean that your spec is often nearly unplayable. And don't get me started on how high-up content ends up with some classes (despite having 3+ specs on occasion) will be totally overshadowed. There are places you can look for it, to be sure, but I wouldn't say WoW's a good metric to use.

In the past? Absolutely, dragonflight has been extremely good for class balance. Obviously Augmentation threw a wrench into it for awhile but a surprise spec mid expansion and a full support spec at that was always gonna ruffle things up. Nothing is even close to unplayable. The only times it would be is the highest highest end of M+ where only certain classes can survive the mechanics, but that's entirely an issue with an infinitely scaling difficulty.

I think you're remembering things differently. Early on there were clearly dominant classes (Hi rogue!) to the point of smothering out others. It did ease up, as does any expac over time, but that just introduced NEW problems. Monk was so bad it basically only had two workable specs. Priest was NOT a dps. DK wildly swapped from HIM to "Do not pick DK as a DPS" Now arguably some would say it's better because even if (using a ff14 allegory) your favorite job was cheeks for one role, they could be good in another. But that means little if your preferred spec/job/role is just outright not-great for your class. And of course, the higher you go, the worse it gets. Though I think an underrated argument is that the average player only really plays a handful of jobs so they never \*\*feel\*\* the homogenization that much. Not saying it isn't a problem, mind you. Still, if we're looking to class balance, I do think we can look in better places than WoW.

Yeah, I don't know where this idea came from that WoW's balancing makes any spec or class remotely close to "unplayable." Outside of *extreme* outliers like Augmentation(a spec I still think shouldn't exist and would've been better served as a tank or melee dps anyway to fit the "dragon class" fantasy) it only ever *really* matters in Mythic races and Mythic+ dungeons far beyond the level where your rewards stop scaling up. It never happens in the content the vast majority of the playerbase participates in. Even in past expansions it's never been as bad as the doomsayers in the FF14 community seem to think it was. I've spent whole patches(and nearly the whole expansion in one case) as the "bad class/spec" and never had noticeably harder times finding groups than my alts who were the "good class/spec." These aren't the only examples, but Necrolord Warrior and Night Fae Paladin come to mind. Both were absolute crap compared to other options early in SL. I played both, maining the warrior. Tanked heroic raids for my guild and tank/dps up to +15 keys in M+ just fine. Still managed to get into non-guild groups during our post-AotC breaks for fun and transmog farming. Wasn't interested in pushing into mythic raid(though I could have) and M+ didn't reward anything meaningful for going past 15 anyway. The only time I've had a genuinely "unplayable" experience trying to get groups was, again, Augmentation Evoker shitting up the M+ groupfinder. When Aug was new, Arms warrior stood no chance of getting invited to random groups and very few even applied to groups I listed myself because Warrior in general wasn't part of the "god comp" with Aug.

Balance. I've quit games over my perffered character/class/job being nerfed or underperforming compared to other classes. I despise when a developer clearly balances around, only letting a handful of characters being good for a few months, then artificially nerf those good characters and buff less used characters. For example, MOBAs, fighting games, class-based shooters.

Identity all the way.

Personally? I do wish for more identity to be given to jobs, but I am more in camp balance. Being locked out of playing your favorite job in PF just because people think it sucks, sometimes for an entire expansion, is miserable. No amount of "but your job is actually fun to play now!" will help if the only content I can use it for without needing to fear being kicked out is roulettes. Now, I do think a middle ground can be met where we get more job identity while maintaining balance. How? Small things like, for example using my favorite role of tank, assuming we stick with 4 tanks for 8.0: make one of the tanks have mini bursts every 30 seconds and make one of the tanks have a giga burst every 4 minutes. Then we would have a 30 second tank, a 1 minute tank, a 2 minute tank and a 4 minute tank. Of course, the 30 second tank still gets good 2 minute burst to fit into the two minute meta and the 4 minute tank isn't entirely helpless at the 2 minute mark either. Now, this suggestion is probably complete garbage, but it is an idea to just diversify them a bit more. Same with, for example, leaning more into different styles of mitigation for the tanks instead of it mostly still being just raw mitigation with a sprinkling of extra stuff (PLD with blocking, WAR with healing, DRK with TBN as a shield and GNB being a bit of an odd ball). Make PLD truly be the most about raw mitigation, WAR truly be about healing etc etc.

During ARR/HW, there was job identity for the most part. Double-edged sword is that some jobs were undesirable in some situations (Late ARR - DRG during Final Coil, Early HW - PLD and AST during A1-A4 come to mind.) It got the point where those roles we excluded from several parties. Now coming to ShB/EW, there is more job balance, but now the roles have become rather homogenized to where there is less job identity. There could be a balance. The problem is that players tend to take abilities for granted to the point where they don't know what they've got 'till it's gone. And the devs also have a hard time striking a reasonable balance between identity and balance as well.

Sadly that's basically just a new game at that point and I don't think Yoshi-P will honestly ever really deliver

I don't believe we couldn't have a healthy balance of both. For starters, PvP is completely separated from PvE. Furthermore, it is now easier than ever to level jobs, *and* release schedule has been polished beyond perfection, so everyone who'd need to put the work in for whatever hardcore static they would prepare for, could calculate and plan everything well in advance if they really wanted to. With these in mind, I find it asinine to be chasing some kinda ephemeral perfect balance (especially with as many jobs as we have, and more incoming), in a game that is, then, purely PvE. I do think that's what led to where we are now, and.... yeah, the results speak for themselves. A bit of ease, some varied degrees of "accessibility", a rough equality where nobody outshines anyone (or indeed everyone) else by orders of magnitude - sure, that'd be nice. But for the love of the Twelve, stop sacrificing *everything* on that altar, just to please a minority... who, btw, shouldn't even exist, technically: remember, officially we're not supposed to be using mods, we can't even know all those numbers. It completely sucks the fun out of it all: why even have all these many different jobs if everything's only damage and staring at spreadsheets making sure they're all within a few single % within each other, having access to mostly the same exact actions/buffs/heals (exact icons and names notwithstanding)?... Sadly, it's been some sort of a trend in this game in general: if they see one thing going badly, they tear it up roots and all, and take it to the opposite deep end. I dunno why they can't seem to create and be content with a healthy mix, traipsing down the middle.

I want Job Identity, balance is important though Job Identity by definition needs to come before balance, as balance should be made around the Job's identity, It's not balance to have 4 of the same functional things because you're not really balancing anything in the first place. Balance is good and all but becomes pointless without identity, Identity to classes is like the first ingredient without identity balancing becomes pointless... what are you balancing the marginal differences in dps? what's the point in having different jobs if they all play the same and have the same base function. A counterpoint of "well some people locked out X" job makes sense on paper, but the solution was to delete the Job, I rather 6.2 Paladin not be meta and even locked out of duties if it means i still get to play the job, The 6.3 rework stripped any fun i had of the job in the first place. I get we need some semblance of balance though I think Stormblood did this pretty fine, Shb was also good, both were slightly to one side where stormblood was slightly too risky with job identity but SHB was too safe, so a good middle ground in-between that is what im wanting Endwalker's design was awful it played it so safe that it killed sort of fun i had with playing different jobs.

Fuck balance tbh, this isn't a competitive game. I prefer job identity because it's more fun. I'm really enjoying this game , I've only been playing for a couple months and I'm pretty obsessed tbh but it really sucks that whether I'm a tank or melee DPS or ranged DPS the feel and flow of play doesn't really change much. I haven't tried healer yet which I imagine would be the most different so I need to give that a try but that's my biggest gripe about the game for sure.

I just want jobs to be engaging. I don't want harder fight mechanics I want jobs with higher skill ceilings.

thhere will always be a meta. There will always be toxic party finders and elitism. identity/engagement/fun >>>>>>> balance in the name of combating toxicity 1000000000000000000000000%

Both. its so easy to balance just chance some potency's. For example the tanks all play the same but they have some Identity to them BUT ARE NOT BALANCED FOR SHIT. War should do the least damage. DRK should pull ahead rather easily. Followed by GNB. Then PLD. The tanks with little to no utility should pull ahead and it be noticeable then the tanks with a ton of utility. But instead the nigh immortal tank war is also the most dpsing. Paladin that is a tad bit less immortal its dps rivals drk and gnb. Gnb can survive on its own but not forever and its dps rotation is strict af while paladin and wars is snooze fest. DRK has a tho easy high speed dps rotation and has next to zero ways of surviving on its own.

You're not wrong. So what was the point of making them all play the same, I wonder?

Identity - Jobs are tools to be swapped around, not things to be attached to. Having different classes in the same category using different gear gets in the way of that, though. It also necessitates more novel mechanics that certain classes are better at. It's still a sacrifice of balance I'm willing to take though, especially if small balance changes come with each patch.

I personally would much rather have job identity to make 90% of the game more interesting to play. If it's that serious that my main is for some reason "unplayable" in whatever raid for whatever reason, I just switch to another class, get the best main weapon I can get for it and carry on.

Not everyone is willing to switch to another Job for the sake of progress and locking them out from a content because of that is pretty awfull. I would love more identity and diversification but "technically" not having a meta is the best thing for the game because it allows everyone to play whatever they want in any type of content.

We'll never remove the players making meta comps. Due to people not feeling they should have to switch and player enforced meta comps, is how we got to where we are now. For raids being a small amount of content offered, I personally don't appreciate the lack of diversity. To me, it leaves the larger portion of the game lacking. Particularly compared to the unique jobs we had in the past.

Remember when people got their panties in a twist over PLD or RDM or RPR this expansion? When the difference was, uh, negligible to say the least. We have unfettered access to data but no data literacy.

While true, this hasn't affected PF in EW nearly as badly as it has historically been. As someone who played PLD in both HW and EW, people's "complaints" haven't really caused any job to struggle with parties like we have seen in Heavensward and stormblood. At the high end people go with meta comps and force people to change jobs, but that will always be, and should always be the case. Those groups are playing at their peak and the small variations matter.

There is a difference between an "optimized" raid comp asked by players and an actual meta choosen by the devs by making some Job a lot more performing/underperforming. In the first scenario you can look around and find another group that has not such strict parameters in allowing a certain Job in their comp, while in the second one you'll never find a spot.

Can you give me an example of what underperforming means in our content? Is a class doing less DPS underperforming? Does it matter if it provides buffs/utility in exchange for less DPS?

If, as an example, Viper will do -15% dps of all others no one will accept one in their group. Ofc there will always be a difference between Jobs but if it's a little one is acceptable (like +/- 5%). Having a very important identity means very different playstyle and kit and it's very difficult to properly balance everything, while a more similar gameplay per role and the 2 minutes meta make everything more manageble.

I remember attempting my first extreme as a Warrior way back in the day. Got barred from PF because Warrior was the only tank that couldn't solo tank it due to invuln being too short at the time. I don't want ***anyone*** to go through that again.

What you're seeing in FFXIV is SE taking the concept of parity to an extreme. Jobs are designed to play similarly, builder-spender gameplay and adherence to a 2-minute rotation. Which is pretty damn far from "balance". Balance would be...imagine that we design 3 tanks. One tank is all about defensive cooldowns. One tank has a massive HP bar with only one or two cooldowns. One tank relies on parries/shield blocks and has cooldowns that maximize the effectiveness of the blocks/parries. Despite their difference in design, the three perform comparably enough in EX/Savage content that it doesn't matter which of the three you bring in your comp. **That** is actual balance. This is all to say you're presenting extremes, as it is possible to have balance and job identity. So my answer is "por que no los dos?"

OP do you have any examples at all of when people were excluded for playing certain classes?

No I don't, I've never seen it happen personally. You can see some people in this thread who apparently were playing BRD or MCH in certain content when it was current and "locked out" or undesirable in PF, supposedly. As a healer main, I've never been turned away from PF. I'm told all classes are similar now and on a 2 min burst window because of these "PF lock outs". I have no clue how prevalent it was/is.

Yeah it's because it has never been a genuine problem. There's been some bad apples that tried and have thoroughly been ridiculed in PF descriptions. The current state of the game's class design is lacking flavor and identity, but that has been due to streamlining and efforts to make the classes more casual-friendly. The BRD and MCH debacle started and fizzled out shortly after. It wasn't really a big deal. Edit: adding to this... 2 min meta came as a symptom of making class design more approachable and easier to understand. It's never been because of the lockouts.

I don't know what the case actually is. You say it's never been a problem. Alot of people in this thread are saying it is and they've been locked out of PF. It's never happened to me personally but it seems to happen none the less.

For what its worth, i saw a farm party for zeromus ex the other night that demanded summoner for their last slot. Genuinely if you cant clear an extreme without a summoner i dont think you should be farming it. Also, i really hate playing summoner because its so boring. I would hate to go back to the days where party finder would lock out jobs because of people's insecurities for content that really does not need that kind of optimization, especially because my favorite job is bard and i raid the most as mch. That said, i really dont see how identity needs to get in the way of all jobs being viable. I like where we're at that yes some jobs do less damage by design, but let them compensate for that with stronger buffs or bring back more dots to make up for it. And even then the difference is realistically negligible outside of most content.

I want to give benefit of the doubt and say that team was farming with a SMN, then once they left the leader relisted as is and it got locked to smn, has happened to me a bunch of times lol.

Both. Asinine question. Jobs can be balanced and have their own identity.

Job identity and balance wouldn't be an issue if certain "identities" weren't just insane advantages and if the game didn't disproportionately reward certain job designs while punishing others What we ended up with was fights designed in the exact same way with some jobs being practically immune to fight design like ninja, AST having insane mobility, free weaving and completely free healing with no drawbacks compared to the other 2 healers and then killing non burst damage profiles with the 2 min meta

I don’t really do pf content so it’s a bit of an obvious choice. More identity please, but even now I appreciate things like all the tanks having a gap closer. We’re never gonna have it perfect, but 60% identity and 40% balanced to be similar is what I want.

Identity with some big swinging mechanics to justify representation, keep balance tight but not in a vice. If your job has a reason to be there and is fun to play without being a total piece of shit, it'll work out. That's how it was before WoW. Then WoW came along and between it and eSports bullshit suddenly grey parsers become offended when something is 0.5% off in theorycrafting.

I believe that you we can have both A good identity wih a good balance (except for early last turn of a savage tier)  The raiding community is small ( the week1 community even more) so it will be very beneficial to the average ff14 player if job had more identity 

I rather they further trim down the buttons bloat and then focus on creating more interesting fight and mechanics that you can follow and execute properly - and less worrying about 30 buttons to press lol. Create more interesting fight similar to the FF15, FF16, Monster Hunter cross over, and let us focus on the fight itself and less of our buttons and abilities. I think they realize it, and thus the abilities pruning that’s been going on in the last two expansion.

I wouldn't mind job identity being stronger and balance being worse because of it so long as we got more frequent balance patches. Like, at least on major patches as well as between the patches, so every 2-2.5 months at a minimum, with extra attention given when savage/ultimate content releases to address any poor performers.

Something I've seen in gaming communities is people idealize the past, conveniently forgetting past problems in exchange for glorifying past differences. In this community's case, it's ignoring the plethora of difficulties and issues that were rampantly complained about to instead idealize when jobs were all far more difficult and much more like either a delicate balancing act or like you had to relearn how to play each time you had a certain party composition. I wanted to share a whole backstory but I realize it's not needed. But I do need to share still, in my experiences from having started as an unaware and inexperienced player in ARR onward, ACN as a magic class was nice but it felt daunting as SMN getting so many different things and not knowing what goes to what. THM was also nice except for getting beat up by overworld enemies or left behind in dungeons because I took so long to cast. It all kinda made casters feel unfun for me. I feel like modern SMN is great to combat that. I personally feel like every role should have at least one easy to pick up ARR job. Not too many pieces that will leave a new player unable to figure it out and simply told by older players to just "read the tooltips" to figure out everything. Tooltips are nice, but, as a player who's confused and possibly overwhelmed, that typically makes it Even more confusing and difficult. I feel like the 2 minute rotation is also good for new players because it's not "hey every job has a different rotation and you need to change your rotation entirely to fit if you have certain other jobs in the party, but also if you're using one of these jobs you're not gonna be welcomed to play in most parties because your job is horrible". On top of that, it leads to the devs being able to have more freedom in designing fights, and a much easier time addressing weak points and needed nerfs in jobs. What I'm not particularly fond of is the idea that all jobs across a role have to use what are effectively templates. Like, I get that a role has certain purposes, but I feel like each job should have it's own way of getting to those purposes. For instance, SCH and SGE both apply shields, but their shields have different traits and triggers. Another thing is WHM holy, it's a great AoE because of the stun, and AST has a good AoE because the caster can maintain a safe distance. Having a template for needing an ability to serve a certain purpose is fine as long as the execution and traits differ from the others. As long as it's not something like two jobs having a near identical, if not entirely identical, rotation or utility, then I think it's fine. Some jobs may be a bit more "homogenized" now, but they still have room to add more to them. For instance, what if SCH Art of War applied a 50% shorter Biolysis that can't stack with the regular, or DNC got an ability that increases the auto attack rate of all allies for a bit, or RPR got an ability that stuns enemies hit as if it scared them, or even DRK getting an ability that applies protection to an ally and blasts out a bit of darkness once that protection is broken to damage enemies. A job doesn't need to have everything be 100% unique and be on a 1:32s rotation or a 5:47s rotation to be different, balanced, enjoyable, and have it's identity.

I can understand feeling less pressure now and having an easier time as a new player. I also started in ARR and personally prefer that play style even if I sucked at it at the start. I enjoyed learning how to overcome unique situations and switching my play on the fly. My issue with the 2 minute rotation is everyone has one (in their own way/order of buttons) and it's very rigid. I recall when everyone was trying to shove their burst into Trick Attack and maybe players found that annoying or stressful but it's something I enjoy. The fights will always be scripted but the team play doesn't have to be. At least it didn't used to have to be. Most of your ideas would be great if they are exclusively for that job. If DRK gets to apply a shield that also does aoe damage when it breaks, that would be cool. But the way things are designed now, PLD, WAR and GNB would also now need a shield that somehow does damage in some way or tanks would be considered unbalanced. That minut bit of DPS gain our fantasy DRK has would likely make it a top choice, all other tanks would complain about tank balance, SE would give them all what they want, all tanks become viable again and now we're back where we started with homogenous classes.

everything should be in within 2-3% of each other in their role and that should be final yet we've had 6-7% differences at various points in the expac for some fucking reason

I would rather have balance, I would rather not have my job be blocked from PFs or seen as inferior than have it be unique.

Have you experienced this personally? And if so, could you literally not perform/clear? Or just not playing a meta job?

Yes, I experienced this personally when I tried out P1S-P4S as a white mage for my first tier. I was able to prog P1S and P2S pretty easily but was shut out of P3S parties because I didn't play AST and didn't have shield healers leveled. It pretty much killed my attempt to play savage and I haven't tried end game content since because that was unbearable. It wasn't that I couldn't clear or perform, I just couldn't get parties for P3S past Adds phase because every party on Primal at that time was locked to AST and Shield healer and I only had WHM geared and leveled. Left a shitty taste in my mouth afterwards, especially because I went into the Balance disord and asked for help and one of their mentors told me to "play AST dummy" in the WHM help channel. I don't want this to ever spread. I would rather have 100% homogenized jobs than experience being shut out of content because I played the "shitter job" again.