What is the Caster Role for 5.0 Going Forward and Where is balance?

[Alym]

I'm of opposite mind to Tanarok. No DPS should ever be focused around an ability to heal, and in essence that is what raise is: a 25% HP heal that can only target incapacitated party members. Instead, casters should be focused on having overwhelming power: to quote Zyneste, glass cannons. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I play spellcasters, my goal is to be a destructive force of nature and not a back-up healer. IMO, SMN raise and RDM raise should be shackled or outright removed from the game, and both their damage potentials raised to compensate.

I'm 100% with this sentiment. Imagine if MNKs and NINs had nerfed dps because they had a melee version of rescue. After progression, it would almost never be used, but the dps tax would always be paid for that ability, even when farming. SAMs and DRGs would be the only desirable melees when progression is over. Melees would rightfully throw a fit.

Raise and casters is just as terrible feeling and kind of ridiculous to me. Why do casters have a progression caster and a farm caster? Why do no other roles have this separation (now that AST got wrecked)? Raise and its dps tax is why. Removing the dps tax would make BLMs obsolete. Giving infinite MP BLMs raise would blow SMN and RDM out of the water entirely. Removing raise as a caster ability, though, would only serve to elevate SMN and RDM.

Simple choice, really.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm 100% with this sentiment. Imagine if MNKs and NINs had nerfed dps because they had a melee version of rescue. After progression, it would almost never be used, but the dps tax would always be paid for that ability, even when farming. SAMs and DRGs would be the only desirable melees when progression is over. Melees would rightfully throw a fit.

Raise and casters is just as terrible feeling and kind of ridiculous to me. Why do casters have a progression caster and a farm caster? Why do no other roles have this separation (now that AST got wrecked)? Raise and its dps tax is why. Removing the dps tax would make BLMs obsolete. Giving infinite MP BLMs raise would blow SMN and RDM out of the water entirely. Removing raise as a caster ability, though, would only serve to elevate SMN and RDM.

Simple choice, really.

I mean, we say that, but by the end of SB, a top-percentile Caster of any job outperformed a top-percentile NIN for tDPS (each in their optimal compositions for their own tDPS). And for most of the expansion, SMN frequently even outperformed BLM, sometimes even in pure pDPS. Its "dps tax" was painfully overstated.

But, I too dislike the idea of "prog" vs. "farm" jobs. Our first example was of course 2.0 WAR vs. PLD, where WAR's self-healing could eventually eclipse PLD's mitigation in light, overgeared content. Across all expansions we've seen it faintly with just more lenient jobs vs. perfectly optimizable jobs (though sometimes those have been, by fluke of balance, one and the same anyways). It was subtle, but any further distinction of casters by their obligatory utility or lack thereof will only hurt the role. I like having utility, but it should come at cost enough that the "dps tax", where/if actually balanced for, has no place, such as through appropriate uptime, throughput, or resource costs when making use of that utility.