Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[linay]

Why? There's little to no additional risk to, say, Superbolide over Hallowed Ground when well managed -- save in that it has a shorter duration. Why should we, their party members, be denied these interactions with these idiosyncrasies? Why should those tanks themselves? I'm not about to defend Living Dead's design, but even it is something that I've learned to work around on any healer, saving Aetherflow, Emergency, and Recitation or Excog to burst heal the DRK back up in the last couple GCDs on SCH, holding every other Bene for it on WHM, etc., etc.

Differences, so long as they're not abhorrently designed (e.g. Living Dead), are generally fun to play with and around. Do not reduce jobs to simple reskins, relabels, and re-lores of Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged, and Caster.

It's fun for some people and not fun for others. That's fine, but my point remains that a dark knight will still be a dark knight and not a paladin regardless if LD works the same as HG or not. Shared effects of certain skills would just point to the shared role between the two.

I'm not against differences, but I'd prefer that those differences are not for the sake of having a difference in fear of "death of job identity," but rather because those differences provide good alternatives. It can be hard to achieve because pragmatism dictates that if you can show one alternative to be better than another, then there is really no point to the alternative. That's when "job identity" should not be used as an excuse to keep the worse alternative. Either improve the weaker alternative while still having it be different or make them the same effect-wise and stick to aesthetic/lore difference.

No matter how you slice it, the onus lies with the dev team to make each job competitive within its own category.

Hence, homogenization.