What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[Shurrikhan]

Three pieces to that:

1) That isn't a problem inherently. It's one thing if someone is making a hardcore game that is billed and executed as a hardcore game (Wildstar, say). But, if that's not the design intent, it's really not a problem.

In any place tight balance doesn't matter... this discussion is irrelevant from the start.

2) That aside, it's not like we have this in any game anyway. Every MMO in history has some classes with higher skill ceilings and some with lower.

Sure. Some variance is inevitable. But there's a hell of a difference between one having 90% the optimization effort of another vs. having only some 40% or less.

There are also ways to differentiate things that work well. Compare SMN and BLM. BLM's rotation is obviously quite a bit more difficult. It has a high gap between skill ceiling and skill floor. Skill floor (ice mage?) does pitiful damage. Skill ceiling is really competitive, though, and one of the top/leading DPSers. SMN, on the other hand, has a low skill floor and ceiling, a narrow gap between them, but also does less damage.

No... just... no. The latter is a bad thing. It means that now one is pushed towards SMN if at or below a certain level of willing effort, and then pushed away from it for anything above that.

You end up with hugely fewer real choices up to that point (X is overpowered), and one fewer real choice after that point (X is underpowered).

Building out kits organically from intuitive, accessible parts to a fairly high ceiling (resulting in nearish to the same skill ceiling, albeit it in varied ways) is always better for offering players breadth of choice than would be purposely stratifying the roster into S, A, B, C, and D tier jobs, where each is better than those above it up until a particular effort threshold and then worse past that threshold.