Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Renathras]

...to clear any content before Extreme difficulty.

This is the problem.

Extreme difficulty is the end-game content for most players. Savage raiders are a growing percent of the community (somewhere between 35-40%) because it's been made more accessible, but that's still a minority, while Ultimates are a minority of a minority. Extreme content is very likely the main endgame for something like 60-70% of the community. When you're proposing a change that affects that many people, it becomes a problem because - again - it isn't optional. As people constantly say, no matter how bad it's become for the game, damage is the only metric that counts. As long as at least one party member has at least 1 HP and the boss has died, any extra healing, mitigation, or utility is irrelevant (so people say), "damage is mitigation/healing because it prevents damage" (absurd in a realistic sense - you can't outdamage a boss before a party member on the verge of death is dead unless the boss is below 3-5%), etc etc.

In short, the community has decided damage IS NOT optional. Meaning any skill expression tied to damage, unless the gap between skill floor and skill ceiling damage is microscopic in % terms, isn't optional at all.

So that can't be how we allow skill expression in the game anymore, since the community has spoken and said that it isn't, in fact, optional, and never is, unless you're doing content with no Enrages, in which case Job balance and skill expression is arguably irrelevant.

To me:

The skill floor is the level of skill needed to reliably clear Extremes.

Anything less than that is irrelevant - a dipping bird on your keyboard with autorun going could clear it - and extremes are the majority of the community's end-game, either as an entry into Savage or as their stand-alone end-game source of weapons and replay-ability farming mounts. And so the "floor" is Extremes.

Thus damage is not optional in a realistic sense unless, again, the difference between floor and cap is vast and/or Extremes have ridiculously lax Enrages. (Granted, they have lately, so who knows? But you still have to have marginally competent players, even with Ex5 letting you blow a Healer LB3 [or possibly 2] and still make it. Seriously, Ex5's Enrage itself is actually appropriate, it's more a check of if your party can get at least one Healer through the stack/spread/cross/cleave/stack-spread combo and/or Limit Cut - if you can just get through all that, unless people are asleep at their keyboards, the DPS should be sufficient...but that's not always the case, as it wasn't in the earlier Extremes.)

Anyway, this is also why I'm a huge proponent of the "different complexity JOBS" (not skill floor vs ceiling) model. It's fine if a game has several easy classes, several moderate classes, and several hard classes. harder classes can be rewarded with feeling good about themselves, or possibly with non-damage utility stuff. But until the community decides to change its collective mind on the damage >>>> all thing, DAMAGE cannot be the thing hugely tied to skill ceilings, because it will NEVER be optional under that paradigm.

Homogenization is such a bad idea, what's the point in having 20+ jobs when the do the same thing as 5. Personally I'd like them to take the FFXI route a bit more, there's a reason why that game is still going strong. The reason behind making everything the same is so that nobody feels left out? Left out of what, high tier raiding groups? No disrespect but aren't they like 5% of the player base? Don't they play for the challenge rather than what job? Maybe just me but I don't care that my PLD may do 8% less damage as long as its true to an identity and becomes a brick wall. Warrior - go for it do you 10% extra damage than the other tanks but be a squashy piece of meat. That's my balancing. If some jobs fall off certain content, that's fine. Players can then just swap job to have a new experience. I feel they are really screwing this game by making it damage damage damage. Going back to FFXI that was a true role experience, they need to do that. I'd argue the majority of people play XIV for story and lore which includes role-playing not the weird stuff but getting in to character. Sword shield defender or an axe wielding maniac. It's all good.

Somewhat agreed. FFXI's Job design and identity are (largely) SO much better.

I think everything should be able to clear content in a general sense, but content should be tuned down to allow that, not Job identity. And there should be complex and intricate Jobs for people that want them, simple for those that want them, and a spectrum in between.

WHM is pretty simple (relatively speaking) while SCH is more complicated, but each are competent and functional, and it's up to the player what they like, with some in-between options available for people that want something in between.

There's no reason FFXIV can't do something like that - and the great irony is, it already did in its past, and in some cases, actually got it to work.