Please stop simplifying and homogenizing the game. Please.

[Recon1o6]

Variations in gameplay cannot come at the expense of job balance. Otherwise you end up with homogenized picks instead of homogenized jobs, which is even worse.

The real problem isn't homogenizing jobs. It's partially homogenizing them. If another job does everything else identically +1 extra thing, then you've created a mandatory pick. Either make the differences significant enough that players can't make a simple mathematical comparison, or make them identical.

they can come at teh expense of balance, providing the balance is small enough not to matter or it brings something else meaningful to the table that counteracts it. The obsession with balance is part of why the game has suffered so much in the job design department. Everything being stripped for numbers you cant see without a 3rd party program.

Example if whm was better than ast by a plentiful amount of damage you'd take whm, but since Ast can just negate p3s's check, then ast would be the better job for that fight. The battle designers don't take into account job strength when designing fights, thats why team jump rope is how the game plays.

+/-5% damage when played at top tier is not exactly unbalanced despite some members of the community thinking it is.
The lack of focus on job fun and identity is why the shb and ew changes are so unpopular and why this thread even exists. A lot of people don't care about balance, they just want fun and to be able to clear content, not neccessarily clear it faster for a log on a 3rd party website