Quote Originally Posted by Terhix View Post
I'd rather have jobs be differentiated by their gameplay than some weird checklist of "strengths and weaknesses".
I think you misunderstand. One necessitates the other.

Any non-trivial difference in gameplay will by its very nature make the job better against some things and worse against others. At that point, design might as well lean into it, focusing the actual tooltip effects even more into the niche and augmenting both the strengths and the weaknesses, "enhance job feel", basically.

Gameplay has to be different, yes. We don't want the current copy/paste job that basically describes every single role but the two ranged ones (and even those are crumbling). But this also assumes everyone is okay with genuinely being weaker in many situations - and stronger in others. But this also means we have to at some point accept that the devs will get blasted with a ton of comments about imbalance and people switching, e.g., to all Black Mage for one fight then all Reaper for the next etc etc, and having to work with that as people are annoying needing to have every job levelled. But at the same time, meaningful gameplay difference without situational imbalance is impossible, far as any MMORPG that tried so far can tell, and it's a lot of years, we can probably just assume this is a universal truth at this point.