Why refusing customization is a fallacy

[Reynhart]

Being sub-optimal means you get odd looks from others

What others ?

The people in Duty finder who won't care as long as everything go smootlhy even if you're not the ultra top DPS they'd like you to be ?
Or the friends who play with you, who know perfectly how you want to play for fun and that it's enough to clear 90% of the content, even at launch ?
Or the people in Party Finder, that you will probably avoid simply because they'll refuse 1st timers on day one and kick you at the 1st mistake ?

And again, apart from Alex Savage, we'll overgear every content pretty soon. Look at ARR. At launch, the best gear was ilvl90.
It allowed you to enter every instance up to Turn 6, released 6 months later.

By the time "casual" content required such a high item level, everybody was around ilvl 120 or higher. Who cares if your BLM isn't perfectly speced if you can roll on content by gear only ?

The real fallacy is pretending that game balance is only important for hardcore raiders. As I've said elsewhere:

If you're not a raider, chances are you'll do most of your content either on Duty Finder or with people you know. That is to say, instances where people don't care what job you are as long as you know how to play it.

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

As I said, "Best In Slot" is a real thing in FFXIV, yet it could be the first form of discrimination.

[Gilthas]

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

No, FFXI is proof that you're wrong.

FFXI's classes were an unbalanced mess, which is why so many jobs were discriminated against for pretty much all party content, not just hardcore raiding.

Job balance is important for everyone, stop trying to pretend that only hardcore raiders care about it because that's a blatant lie.

[KaedrianLiang]

No, FFXI is proof that you're wrong.

FFXI's classes were an unbalanced mess, which is why so many jobs were discriminated against for pretty much all party content, not just hardcore raiding.

Job balance is important for everyone, stop trying to pretend that only hardcore raiders care about it because that's a blatant lie.

Tanks were even more scarce then than in ffxiv. So scarce that i was in a position to decline any party invite. LOL at the rage that follows after declining though :Q

Those unwanted classes were desperate for exp.

[Duelle]

Things as designed right now are tuned well enough that you don't have glaring issues between the jobs. The closest thing to that in recent memory was BRD and MCH at launch, where people would cringe at having them around since they convinced themselves the group's DPS went down just from having them in the group.Balance between jobs matters regardless of the level of content. Any trends formed at endgame trickle down to the rest (see: WARs being told they couldn't tank past HM Garuda when the issue for WARs was turn 4 of coil). Trying to use gear progression as an excuse to throw balance to the wind outside of raiding is short-sighted and doesn't do anything to help your argument.

And even if you continue to ignore it, I'll reiterate: the type of customization that would work alongside preserving balance is in the form of aesthetics. Spell effects, flavor abilities and replacement abilities would go along way in helping develop job individualism without messing with class balance.

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

It's an excellent example of what would happen if the devs went along with you. Most of what happened there was a combination of bad design and human nature. You seem to severely underestimate the latter or are just oblivious to the consequences for some reason.

[Fynlar]

As anyone who's played FFXI could probably tell you, customization is a myth. Hell, even bonus stat allocation in this game is something that's largely unnecessary to have, because the majority of the classes really only have one worthwhile choice, which isn't really much of a choice at all.

What would end up happening (because this happens in *every* game that allows customization) is that the bean counters will find out what has the greatest overall practical/statistical benefit, and then everyone will have to run that particular setup or they will be gimp as hell. It's merely an illusion of choice.