Quote Originally Posted by Saraide View Post
Naturally you make your time as a dev tasked with balancing easier if you make the jobs all very similar to each other, right?
Here's a hot take: The problem is the existence of raid buffs.

In a world without raid buffs, you can design the outgoing damage profile of each job in isolation from all other jobs, and you can make that damage profile whatever you want, from a relatively constant stream of damage to high/low phases. As long as each job within a role does roughly the same damage over N minutes -- where N can be as long as the expected time to enrage, for example -- then each job is "viable" from a damage standpoint. As long as each job within a role has roughly the same freedom of movement and action ranges, you can wave your hand and assume that they'll all be able to resolve mechanics to maintain uptime, either by moving around any "bursts" in their rotation or by coordinating with the rest of the party. There's room for variety between jobs, individual creativity, and group creativity.

The existence of even a single raid buff forces you to consider all possible party compositions, because there's no other way to evaluate the impact of a raid buff. Worse, you have to consider what the players will come up with in their inevitable quest to optimize damage. So, even if you could set a DPS check such that all party compositions pass it, you also have to ensure that there isn't a meta composition that's so much better than the rest that players start insisting on some jobs and excluding other jobs. After all, you can't claim a job is "viable" if no one wants you to play it.

The "obvious" way to deal with the possibility of meta compositions is to take away player creativity via homogenization: give (most) everyone an obligatory raid buff, force every job into a 2min burst, etc. But when you concentrate damage into short bursts, minor imbalances and random fluctuations become magnified beyond reason…