Originally Posted by
Silenka
This is the issue with the battle system and the kind of monotone "balance" the dev team is looking for. The minute one job is preferred over the others or one job is left out for not being as good as others, people gotta bitch about it. It was a huge issue in XI, and this still happens in XIV, even with the monotone cut & paste that the XIV jobs were created to be to avoid being XI mk.II. Yet how can we have more individualistic, differentiated jobs without having issues where some jobs are going to be more or less preferred than others?
I'm not sure there can ever be a battle system for XIV where every job is preferred equally for most content and fulfills the needs of this community. I dunno about you guys, but personally, I'm willing to let a couple jobs be relatively shit or OP if it means that the battle system is overall more fun and engaging. It's too bad that in XI it happened to be my favorite job that was shit for most things (SMN), but oh well, you know? Seeing the alternative - the monotone, the lack of itemization, and still having some balance problems despite taking most of the color out of the battle system - makes me realize that it wasn't so bad in XI. To me, it was more fun that jobs had niches. It gave having different jobs actual purpose, unlike how now the job system is broken up by role only and who cares which one you actually pick in that role because they all do mostly the same thing. And there is a downside to requiring a specific job for specific content, because in XI if you couldn't find someone with that job you were fucked, but that's largely a non-issue in XIV with the introduction of Duty Finder and cross-world PF.
Now, if Yoshi-P and the crew can figure out how to make XIV's battle system a little more fun and engaging AND achieve perfect balance where every job is useful for everything, that would sure be something. I know it's their goal, but I also think it's almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to achieve. Someone's always going to get the short straw, whether it be for a crucial ability or that little bit of difference in dps/mitigation. But as soon as people start complaining about it, the dev team drives for more monotony and more "balance", and so we keep receding from what most of us seem to actually want.