Quote Originally Posted by sharknado View Post
Old-style unique/job identity is extremely hard to balance if at all.
Really, the only way you can truly "balance" a wide variety of distinct classes/jobs/whatever is to simply stop caring about making them all equally viable and just lean into making them all equally interesting. Which can work, but I'm not going to pretend like I've seen it work well often. Meanwhile, we as a community—at least at the high end—have also demonstrated if something is not "optimal" it may be shunned compared to optimal compositions; witness MCH being locked out of some PF groups back during Abyssos initially, which suggests "prioritizing unique play above balance and equal viability" may not be a strat that would work for this particular game.

I don't entirely like where things are at—leastwise for healers—as a player, but putting on my game dev hat, boy can I agree that this makes actually making things (mostly) equally viable at endgame a much less horrible task to tackle.