Quote Originally Posted by Frodnoxx View Post
Perfect balance will NEVER be achieved until the devs make every job carbon copies of each other, which they are well on their way of doing. Until then there will always be deviation that is exacerbated by the 1% and trickled down to the masses who don't know what they want to play.

It's an ironic cycle actual. Players don't know what they want to play because none of the jobs have any outstanding identity or uniqueness mechanically, so they just play whats good numerically. Devs see that there is a skew towards those jobs and further homogenized to achieve closer numeric balance and consequently even less uniqueness. Players lean further into the numerically advantageous jobs despite those jobs having a smaller advantage now.

Uniqueness and perfect balance are at odds, yes. But that doesn't mean uniqueness can't be balanced. And SE has just been exceptionally lazy with their job design decisions.
The saddest part was that a lot of what people ask for these days, more meaningful support, difficult healing, enmity meaning something, individuality between jobs, etc. was all there back then. The problem was the playerbase caused every problem to now.

People just wanted to get to the boss and didn't want to run through adds in Raids, so the journeys to the bosses was removed. People refused the higher difficulty dungeons we got, so the dungeons weren't that difficult anymore. People refused to learn how to do mechanics and run Steps of Faith as it originally was, so it got dumbed down to being able to ignore mechanics (the instance not resetting when everybody was dead didn't help). People complained that healing was too daunting, so it got dumbed down. People complained that maintaining enmity was too hard, so it got dumbed down. People complained that X job can't do Y, so it wasn't being taken into raids, resulting in Y being given to X jobs (homogenization).

The playerbase again, is why things are as they are now. We can't have anything nice because of outcries. Hell, they tried to get both Final Steps of Faith and Royal Menagerie nerfed for Hydaelyn's sake, both of which are not difficult fights (nor were they really at launch). We're never going to have that individuality back because of the playerbase.