Branching jobs / Advancements

[Cetek14]

That would be great, but people are obsessed with meta. If we have 1 job and 2 "specializations", if one is going to have 1 dps more than the other, the other will be locked out of Party Finder. Its better to fix basic jobs first, because there are things to fix.

[Shurrikhan]

That would be great, but people are obsessed with meta. If we have 1 job and 2 "specializations", if one is going to have 1 dps more than the other, the other will be locked out of Party Finder. Its better to fix basic jobs first, because there are things to fix.

That, too, is largely a consequence of having incredibly few seemingly unique or impactful advantages beyond mere damage-dealable-over-fight-length.

The more we streamline to pander to the shallowest forms of a "only damage matters" perspective--rather than leaving DPS relatively tight but providing more, and more impactful, uptime-saving tools or other indirect forms of possible advantage--the worse it'll get.

Sadly, because we generally push healing no further than a minimization metagame and active mitigation so barebone, there are very few opportunities for anything else.

Do we really want to simplify all that even further, until all we have left are varying forms of either direct-damage or percentile-damage-raid-buff CD whack-a-mole? Because that's what limiting ourselves to solely what is made appealing by easily quantifiable rDPS values will do.

The closer you push different choices' means of capacity, the tighter you have to push those capacities too. Homogenization helps balance for the all of two weeks it takes the community to adjust its standards and demand you perform within 3% of the lead choice's easily-quantifiable-rDPS, down from some 8%.