Give us back the old Paladin

[ForsakenRoe]

The more constraints that you add to the design process, the less unique solutions exist that satisfy those constraints. Let's say that I give you a total action budget of 25 actions. Let's say that 8 are defensives that don't allow for a whole lot of variability. Tank stance, a ranged pulling action, and a gap closer are also mandatory. You have a base single target and AoE combo which locks in another 6 actions, leaving us with around 8-9 actions to work with. Now I also tell you that players expect the jobs to have roughly the same rDPS, roughly the same burst profiles, and whatever else we argue about in these subforums to try to gain a competitive edge over everyone else.

There is a world of difference between '25 actions total' and '25 action buttons on the hotbar'. SMN has one of the lowest hotbar-real-estate counts in the game, but it's 'actions' menu is absolutely rammed, due to how those few buttons swap into other buttons. So, yeh, I could give you a GNB that has 25 buttons, but actually has closer to 35 'actions', via clever application of systems like Continuation. God help the playerbase if I had been in charge of GNB design for it's launch, cos first thing I'd do is make it have 6 cartridges (you know, like the trailer implies?), and everything would have been designed around that. 'oo spend one cartridge on burst strike' get outta here

As far as homogenization of "cool new abilities that everyone asks for" goes, people don't want the ability itself, they want the function. In a similar vein to giving PLD a gap closer in ShB, copy-pasting onslaught was the boring (and possibly lazy) way to approach it. Again, look at melee DPS, we have 5 jobs that all have movement abilities that vary in some way (shukuchi is ground targetted, thunder clap is targetted on enemy/ally, RPR has a blink, SAM/DRG charge an enemy), while tanks are all Onslaught/Plunge (I forget which came first) with a either 2 or 3 charges.

the playerbase: boo we hate homogenization, make the classes different from one another
also the playerbase: yes dood i am making the pog face because PLD now also has a gapcloser, that we won't even use for closing gaps because it has damage attached!

Like, don't get me wrong, some homogenization is good, and necessary. Nobody thought that ShadowWall being 180s CD, and 30% mit, so equal to Veng but with an extra minute CD attached for no gain, was good. Sentinel/SW/Veng being standardized was good. But we didn't need 'all tanks have gap closer, and it has 2 charges', and especially not on 'the tank that has an entire dedicated section of it's rotation being ranged'. What next, we give BLM a raise skill because the other two have it? Or we give DRK a 'this skill heals for 1000+ potency, 1min CD' because GNB and WAR have Aurora/Equil?