I don't see how you can make balance adjustments without nerfs. An upward balance of buffs leads to power creep. Tank mitigation cooldowns are a good example of this. Right now, the vast majority of tankbusters are either dealt with by invuln or supercooldown. It trivialises fights.

The ready availability of invulns also devalues all of your other cooldowns. 20% DR might have been a lot in ARR, but now it's definitely not enough. Damage has to rise to offset the sheer amount of defensives that we have. The solution is obviously not to buff every tank into having a 3 minute recast Holmgang or a 60 second Dark Mind. Nobody likes nerfs, but sometimes they're essential.

Shielding is another example. We've seen a steady rise in the amount of shielding available over the expansions. The problem with shields is that they don't really have diminishing returns in the same way that % DR does. They can also create some fairly sizeable windows in which there really isn't any outgoing damage. That's not even mentioning that silly LB cheese. The solution, unsurprisingly, doesn't involve handing out more shields. You need more checks.

Again, I'm going to go ahead and throw out a guess that the new shield resource bar that's coming is going to involve some restrictions and upper bounds on shields. The devs do like indirect nerfs.

Raises in prog are yet another example. Everyone wants a raise, and I'm not talking about gil. But it really should be a limited resource. The MP cost and cast times were presumably put in there to be prohibitive. But at the moment, we have tremendous potential to recover from mistakes. Again, the solution is not to give every dps their own personal raise. Limit access to it, either by recast or number of uses. Then you actually have to think twice about how it gets used.

Raid buffs are a fairly tricky issue. You can try and offset raid buffs against personal dps all you want, but all things being equal, most people prefer working with jobs that bring buffs because it makes their personal dps look better.

Once again, I think this is a problem of diminishing returns. I acknowledge the point about Trick's effectiveness dropping off in council fights (when they actually happen). However, most raid buffs sit on the player and tend to be multiplicative. Should there be some sort of diminishing return to stacking partywide raid buffs? I'm not sure what the answer is, but I don't think the answer lies in giving every healer buff cards.

Nerfs are not necessarily out there to crush your happiness and force you off your favourite jobs. Although it would be nice to raid with a comp that feels slightly different from 2014. Some jobs have been 'must' picks for what feels like forever. Also, slashing must be purged.