Quote Originally Posted by Ardox View Post
The old cross-class system was poorly designed, but it doesn't negate the main point here: There is no customization what so ever. If we had a snapshot of all the character right before ShB's release, we'd see every player's main job to have the exact same gear, with the exact same melds.

For better or for worst, this stem from the dev's desire to make every job extremely balanced. Therefore, they need to account for every variables and the most you put in your equation, the harder it gets to forecast how it's going to turn out. You can see it by how dummed down the stats are now: Healers care only for mind, caster for intel, physical dps for strength.. That's why since HW, the gear you get is always maxed out in their job's respective stat (making the corresponding materia useless).

I feel the equations they use to compute the difficulty of their encounter is getting more and more rigid an that's why they keep taking out stuff
If i understood correctly the main point is that customization, will either make the game better (or more interesting) or fix some issues, both of those notions are deluded, however the mian point that i was trying to make is that customization simply doesnt work well on this game for the reasons you are stating.

Besides that everything looked the same gear wise and materia wise for every player, its kind of a lie at least for MNK, since you could have some variance in SkS, going from 900-1200, that implied that everything in that spectrum was viable (and there was no need for customization) so, for MNK at least, you could see a huge diference (in materia and gear) between one player and another both being perfectly viable for end game (and casual content), to certain degree at the end of ARR was the same because of SCH speed boost so there was some diversity gear and melds wise (not taking into account accuracy at the time).