Quote Originally Posted by Voltyblast View Post
Infact all we have to look is at the 3 new jobs we've got: instead of actually try something original they copied the pre-existing jobs in fear that their diversity wouldn't be effective, and being effective in dps and heal is basically all that this games want: anything less is unwanted.
It's not as clear cut as you think it may be. Part of the issue is that there's nothing in the way of new/unique resources to help build up gameplay for the new jobs. The job that has the closest thing to a resource is MCH with ammo, except even that behaves like a stacked damage buff that gets consumed when you use abilities. This may be because of UI limitations (like the hell the devs supposedly went through to let us see the TP of our party members), or perhaps one of those "this is Final Fantasy so all classes have to work off TP and MP only!" things.
AST is the best example here: their stances are literal copies of SCH and WHM skills and I really REALLY fear this might be a trend in the future because, instead of making a new interesting combat for them they simply copied pieces of the existing healers. Despite having the card Mechanics - which I really like - their skill sets is a literal copy of the pre-existing healers, and if they were an original healer - like a discipline priest for example - they might be ignored totally because "not effective as WHM or SCH".
There's a couple of things you're not taking into account. First that they've invested so much into the WHM+SCH combo that it's probably difficult for the devs to work in extra healing that provides different gameplay without getting outpaced by either or. That's largely why AST was designed to be a partner to one or the other (going Diurnal when partnered with SCH, going Nocturnal when partnered with WHM). I'll be the first one to tell you it's a very flimsy excuse, but having just leveled WHM and SCH to 60 and currently leveling AST, I'm starting to see how this all fits together. It's still not good design and sure as hell should not have happened, but that's the way things are right now.