Give me your most unhinged Job take that you still genuinely believe in.

[RyuDragnier]

I see this take a lot, and it makes me conjure up the hypothetical opposite scenario; What if jobs hadn't been homogenized, and the Heavensward-Stormblood meta stuck around? Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things I miss about FF14's design from that era. I also remember job "balance" being something like
Job A and Job B compete for a slot. Do they have unique advantages that make both attractive in different scenarios? Lmfao keep dreaming, Job A is just superior to B in every way because they made the utility-heavy jobs also the highest damage output ones, and Chopped Liver over here has like one "advantage" that XIV's combat system doesn't care about in the slightest.
Not accusing you of anything, and I'd rather not be uncharitable. This "focusing on balance leads to homogenization!" take has the ring of truth to it. I'd caution that taking the opposite tack also smacks of "why couldn't you plebeian strictly-worse jobs have just accepted the permanent utility-job superiority meta so we could all have fun!"

That's part of the issue. If you look at the metas for both HW and SB, there was always at least 1 job from every role type that was unloved and unwanted, simply because the others did it that much better. Ranged, Casters, Melee, Tanks, Healers...there was always at least one left out in the cold for each type.

[Silver-Strider]

That's part of the issue. If you look at the metas for both HW and SB, there was always at least 1 job from every role type that was unloved and unwanted, simply because the others did it that much better. Ranged, Casters, Melee, Tanks, Healers...there was always at least one left out in the cold for each type.

And instead of bumping those jobs up, SE decided to drag everyone else down. Sure, some things needed adjustments in order to give a more leveled playing field but SE took it to the extreme and just made the gameplay overall less engaging as a result

[RyuDragnier]

And instead of bumping those jobs up, SE decided to drag everyone else down. Sure, some things needed adjustments in order to give a more leveled playing field but SE took it to the extreme and just made the gameplay overall less engaging as a result

The problem is how some of the jobs were. Look at NIN, TA was the main reason why it was taken constantly. Had TA been given to another DPS, if their damage had been any higher NIN would have been pushed out because the other DPS would have been better due to higher damage. If the other job did lower damage, NIN still would have been taken. That's the problem with the meta, it min/maxes things, so ANY discrepancy can lead to a job being dropped from the meta. If a job didn't have anything that aligned properly with the rest of the party's burst, they were also dropped. So the devs decided to give everybody a 2m burst window to make the playerbase knock it off...which has led to...well, complaints about it.

[Semirhage]

And instead of bumping those jobs up, SE decided to drag everyone else down. Sure, some things needed adjustments in order to give a more leveled playing field but SE took it to the extreme and just made the gameplay overall less engaging as a result

Therein is the problem: "bumping those jobs up" doesn't solve the issue at hand. When you have jobs with utility and jobs without, what do you get? Heavensward and Stormblood. You have an upper class of jobs that is just better in every way. Their numbers are high and their utility is great. Then you have the Chopped Liver jobs: the ones whose numbers are fine and....that's all they do. Numbers.

Oldschool singleplayer RPGs at least understood that a jack of all trades had to give something up for it; if you have a class that can do everything and is also good at everything, that's basically the definition of overpowered. And if you "bump up" the non-utility jobs, you know exactly what happens. The "more complex" job mains screech and moan that they deserve the higher output for being "harder". You can't win. I think there's room for a game that's designed with different jobs, that have different strengths, that get catered to by different content.

But FFXIV isn't that game, because all the combat system cares about is damage. Because Squeenix thinks it's okay to have a divide between utilityless baby jobs and "complex" jobs stuffed to bursting with utility, while also thinking it's possible to balance that out. I want the variety of Heavensward back, but I don't want the boring landscape where you had 8 jobs that were just flat better than the others. At the very least I've heard WoW tends to shake up jobs every expansion instead of FFXIV's "and the bland utilityless no-frills job continues to be bland and designed for novices. Oh no, how is it possible that we have a super clear meta that was obvious from the get-go, how could this have been? Who could have predicted that the jobs we designed to be good at everything were...good at everything?"

This is some basic class balance stuff that XIV refuses. There is a third way that isn't Everyone Is Homogenized or Haha Eat It Non-Utility Jobs, We're Just Better.