Next new job better be heals

[Lastelli]

My other concern is seeing a recent reddit poll where after tallying casual and hardcore players the biggest issue people feel they have with their job is...their position in relation to meta. I know balance has always been a big complaint and I hate to think that SE is putting balance on a pedestal and letting it ruin job design because of it.

Job design is ruined not because they want all jobs to be perfectly balanced. It's ruined because they want to make all jobs easy and accessible. Accessibility is why the healers' dps kit was simplified. Balance is easily achievable even with very diverse jobs and toolkits, you just have to tweak potencies and keep arbitrary synergies like the old disembowel and crit stacking to a minimum. There's no point arguing about balance, that's not the problem here. The devs simply lack imagination, they don't know how they can make healers more interesting given the current structure of the game, especially when it comes to end game content. They keep giving them more and more oGCD heals and obviously they had to nerf their potencies so that healing savage content isn't a total joke and removed some dps skills to limit button bloat.

[Saefinn]

Job design is ruined not because they want all jobs to be perfectly balanced. It's ruined because they want to make all jobs easy and accessible. Accessibility is why the healers' dps kit was simplified. Balance is easily achievable even with very diverse jobs and toolkits, you just have to tweak potencies and keep arbitrary synergies like the old disembowel and crit stacking to a minimum. There's no point arguing about balance, that's not the problem here. The devs simply lack imagination, they don't know how they can make healers more interesting given the current structure of the game, especially when it comes to end game content. They keep giving them more and more oGCD heals and obviously they had to nerf their potencies so that healing savage content isn't a total joke and removed some dps skills to limit button bloat.

The impression I've got is that it's not tied to one issue. The balance is involved still, given the huge emphasis on it, perhaps their way of addressing balance is not imaginative either, but homogenisation is not a symptom of trying to simplify a role, because they could still have a complicated healer role and still homogenise. Homogenisation is one of the easier methods for balance. Balance has been a good part of job feedback I've heard of the years and people are seemingly obsessed with how well their job performs versus the next.

Whilst balance is achievable in other ways, I do not agree that it is "easily" done, because it's not just adjusting potencies and synergies. If you're fighting against something like a striking dummy, that might be enough. But when you throw in game mechanics, how jobs are able to handle them and how jobs functionally work and so on that can throw balance out.

When it comes to accessibility, my argument has been that healers were already accessible, especially WHM, WHM IMO was always a great healer for beginners. The game has always loosely accommodated the idea of varied difficulty in jobs and DPS jobs still have it, but seemingly healers have lose it.

To summarise, homogenisation makes it easier to balance whilst simplification makes it more accessible. But I agree, maybe their handling of these issues hasn't been the most imaginative or the best way of handling them.Should we blame the idea of balance? Definitely not, but I feel it gets overemphasised as an issue when there's other things that make jobs great that're being diluted. While balance is achievable without diluting them, I'd rather sacrifice a level of balance if it means the devs find it easier/more achievable to give me fun and engaging jobs.


With regards to button bloat, also something they could have worked around:
WHM: More dual purpose spells, like how Assize has a dual purpose
SCH: More spells get enhanced by Emergency & Deployment Tactics to give them wider functionality, perhaps for DPS and utility, EG. Emergency Tactics + Biolysis = all of Biolysis' damage hits at once (like Thunder procs on BLM). Bring back Selene and give her more useful abilities. SMN already has a system where skills change depending on what pet you have.
AST: there's space for the old card system still. To fix the problems of the old card system, use the current Minor Arcana system. Because this is how we now deal with cards we don't want and it works.