Why have Defense and Magic Defense?

I'm bringing this up because of the way defense and magic defense work.

I don't have specifics on how they work, like actual detailed information, but let's put Defense Rating, Level of job and Monster into perspective.

I was doing A4S at level 66 on White Mage and noticed abilities were hitting me a LOT harder than at level 60 when I ran this with a raid group. So I went on my scholar since it is level 60 and wanted to see the damage output. Sure enough, the boss did roughly 25% less damage to my scholar than my white mage, yet my white mage has 916 Defense and 1600 magic defense and my scholar is at 896 defense, 1565 magic defense.

So what I see is, Defense and Magic Defense scale depending on value and level. When you level up, it is like Crit and Spell speed, where you need more to get the same % out of it than you did in lower levels. This is fine for those stats tho, since they always increase with Item Level at a normal rate.

Defense however, does not increase at a normal rate. If you look at the pattern in 2.0 and 3.0, you will notice yes, the gear gets more than +1 per upgrade. But eventually it caps out and any higher item level yields only 1 more defense. So in the end, defense caps out for a given expansion, not content level. This can be proven if you look at http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/PLD and search item levels 190-240, you will see the cap out at i210.

This being said, can we just have a flat value for damage reduction based on our roles eventually? Feeling weaker as you level is not a fun thing. Or at least put monster level into play when actually taking damage...so if you are a higher level it doesn't penalize you for not hitting the defense cap.