Dear SE, stop homogenizing jobs

[Nedkel]

Give us completely different random jobs and do not gate progression behind discriminatory min maxing content. For real this game is sooo casual that you have to spend whole week with pugs to even roll something.

[linay]

For real this game is sooo casual that you have to spend whole week with pugs to even roll something.

What are you talking about?

[Shurrikhan]

No ones assuming any kind of fatalistic zero-sum; we can and do already have both. Variety always comes at a cost to balance, though.

No, it comes at a cost of time, and rarely separately from the development of the variety originally. New things take time to fit into the game and test thoroughly. It is only to the extent of adding another of anything that is not a carbon copy of what already exists that variety "costs" (in truth, merely "requires") balance.

And refusing ever to add anything new, or insistence on collapsing what we already have into fewer and fewer types, should not be acceptable.

All I'm saying is be careful what you wish for.

That... clearly works both ways, as anyone who's played before ShB would know, let alone as far back as ARR or HW.

[Nedkel]

What are you talking about?

Im saying.
They are pretending to make game for casuals, but actually most of their focus is aimed at savage-extreme content. They change job according to the raid needs and balance, they are giving more raids than semi-challenging dungeons, they put the best rewards behind that content, and if you do not do it your are locked away into doing raid alliance once in a week and capping tomestones. This results in homogenisation of jobs, because each job has to meet certain requirement otherwise nobody plays it, because its not viable in the only content that really matter

[Lastelli]

You should not be expected to play every class in the game to a exceptional level to savage raid. Nor should it be required to gear 28 classes to enter raiding either.

While I do agree that balance is important and it should be good enough to let you play your preferred job without having to worry about being excluded from parties, you clearly used a strawman here.
A good rule of thumb is to chose a role and level a couple of jobs to be reasonably sure that at least one is not the unlucky red headed step child of the expansion.

Anyway I can't help but laugh at how misplaced some people's anger is...jobs didn't get more homogenized because of balance. Balance only has to do with numbers and parameters. If the devs decided to achieve balance by making jobs more similar because it was easier, that's entirely on them, but let me tell you that nobody in the "toxic elitist raiding community" asked for brd to be stripped of most of their utility, nobody asked for drk/war to become the same job with a slight thematic difference, nobody asked for healers' dps rotation to be simplified to 1 dot and 1 nuke or for ast's cards to have all the same effect and so on.

Jobs were homogenized because the devs want this to be an easy and accessible game. And accessibility is not something hardcore raiders really care about, since most of them can optimize a job regardless of how it plays.

[purgatori]

While I do agree that balance is important and it should be good enough to let you play your preferred job without having to worry about being excluded from parties, you clearly used a strawman here.
A good rule of thumb is to chose a role and level a couple of jobs to be reasonably sure that at least one is not the unlucky red headed step child of the expansion.

Anyway I can't help but laugh at how misplaced some people's anger is...jobs didn't get more homogenized because of balance. Balance only has to do with numbers and parameters. If the devs decided to achieve balance by making jobs more similar because it was easier, that's entirely on them, but let me tell you that nobody in the "toxic elitist raiding community" asked for brd to be stripped of most of their utility, nobody asked for drk/war to become the same job with a slight thematic difference, nobody asked for healers' dps rotation to be simplified to 1 dot and 1 nuke or for ast's cards to have all the same effect and so on.

Jobs were homogenized because the devs want this to be an easy and accessible game. And accessibility is not something hardcore raiders really care about, since most of them can optimize a job regardless of how it plays.

How does homogenisation make the game easier or more accessible? Most people main 1 job, and maybe dabble in some others: It doesn't it an easier time on them if WAR and DRK are mechanically the same, as they're only playing/maining one of these anyway.

[Lastelli]

How does homogenisation make the game easier or more accessible?

Because their idea of accessibility is to let casual players perform decently well in savage content, apparently. It's clear that they want more people to do savage (balance for anything else doesn't matter because everything is so easy) and it's way easier for casual players to tackle that kind of content when they know their job has specific duties with very little variance, regardless of party composition.
Again, it's easier to perform decently if all jobs are easy to play. Back in HW we had more complex rotations, more timers/dot to pay attention to, more offensive buffs because of the cross-class system. People complained that it was "too hard" to keep track of everything, so the devs gradually removed dots and buffs. Missing positionals was also more penalizing, so potencies were gradually adjusted and positional requirements removed. All these things contribute to make jobs feel more similar, but that's not because of balance considerations. It just had to do with players effectively asking for the jobs to become easier to play.
Even now, when most jobs have more or less comparable tools, some people argue that they're not exactly the same (melee's gap closer thread in the dps section of this forum), without considering how the kit works as a whole.
And let me tell you...hardcore players mostly don't care about these things, because they can and will make any job work under any circumstances.

edit: another non-issue some people still bring up: button bloat. There's no button bloat in this game, not since stormblood, you can easily fit all your relevant skills neatly with a little planning, and yet we have people asking for 1-button combos, without realizing that would be the biggest contributor to homogenization because the slight difference in how combos branch do give some flavor to melee dps and tanks' gameplay. Once again, this has nothing to do with balance.

[Kleeya]

Lol what. Like all the AST cards becoming the same is not a direct result of the end game theorycrafters dictating that everything apart from moar damage balance is useless and shouldn't be used. Or the removal of BRD's buffs a direct result of end game groups bringing only them to look better on fflogs when Rdps was not a thing.

Even if you dont directly ask for it on the forums, SE is monitoring what you do, and is acting accordingly. Jobs becoming easier to play might be a thing, but saying that end game raiding habits has no influence on the homogenization is false. Just look for example, for taking my old main job, at the number of people asking for the removal of RDM's chainrez in exchange for a better dps, all for the sake of parsing the same numbers as the other jobs on fflogs.

[LeoLupinos]

Part of the problem is caused by the game lack of complexity to include more identity to the Jobs. I find it difficult to imagine what else they could do with the game as it is.

By adding complexity they could add more identity to selected Jobs proportionally with the complexity added. Example, adding Defense for Bosses and having Healer the role to reduce it. Since heals are scripted, they can balance around a rotation for healers to be able to do it. Not difficult to imagine.

They could do something similar as FF7 Remake's Staggering mechanic, so a selected Role would need to take care of doing the rotation properly to make the Stagger damage increase mechanic happen at the best times. Even making it easier to recognize "raid buff synergy moment" for newcomers.

They could do something with materia, and expand it. Can't think of anything fit for the game atm tho.

I think that DPS Roles need to have a more defined role. Ranged, Caster and melee doesn't have much identity with the Role actions compared to tanks and healers.

[Esmoire]

Lol what. Like all the AST cards becoming the same is not a direct result of the end game theorycrafters dictating that everything apart from moar damage balance is useless and shouldn't be used. Or the removal of BRD's buffs a direct result of end game groups bringing only them to look better on fflogs when Rdps was not a thing.

Even if you dont directly ask for it on the forums, SE is monitoring what you do, and is acting accordingly. Jobs becoming easier to play might be a thing, but saying that end game raiding habits has no influence on the homogenization is false. Just look for example, for taking my old main job, at the number of people asking for the removal of RDM's chainrez in exchange for a better dps, all for the sake of parsing the same numbers as the other jobs on fflogs.

It's how I feel as well. I could be entirely wrong and I can't be putting words into the developer's mouth so it is all conjecture but I can't help but blame the vocal minority that is our hardcore raiders, a small % of our playerbase playing what is literally <2% of the game's content (up to 12 raids, few ex trials, one ultimate), for a lot of my least favourite design decisions with Shadowbringers. Like I can't help but feel we can't Aetherflow outside of battle anymore, because it has to become like a lot of resource-generation actions, and if people could use it outside of battle the mathematically correct option would be to use it, wait for CD, then everyone can start, which would make repeated attempts worse. Sounds good in theory but for the vast majority of people just playing the game we don't care and just want to start. When I hear people want to take res away from RDM, the one DPS I like to play and their utility being a huge part of it, I want to smack them over the head. They already killed AST for me.

Of course I also blame the developers themselves for their lack of creativity when it comes to the way they design actions and traits. FFXIV is a great game but they somehow managed to make the actions more boring over time. Like, with my earlier example, they could alleviate some of their design restrictions if they didn't insist on all job gauges starting at 0.