Can anyone clearly explain "job homogenization" in this game?

[Carighan]

I personally do not believe this game has homogenization

Just like with many things IRL like whether the earth is flat or not, reality could not possibly care any less about what you believe. This is not a believe-based thing, it's an empirical science, you can look at something and check whether it has homogenization (not a single MMORPG currently on the market does not have homogenization) and if yes, which types and to what degree.

You can believe in a lot of things. You can believe in Santa Claus. You can believe you need another coffee. But you can just look to see how much homogenization is in a class design setup. Like, with your eyes and stuff.

[HikariKurosawa]

Just like with many things IRL like whether the earth is flat or not, reality could not possibly care any less about what you believe. This is not a believe-based thing, it's an empirical science, you can look at something and check whether it has homogenization (not a single MMORPG currently on the market does not have homogenization) and if yes, which types and to what degree.

You can believe in a lot of things. You can believe in Santa Claus. You can believe you need another coffee. But you can just look to see how much homogenization is in a class design setup. Like, with your eyes and stuff.

That's funny how you put it like that. I agree, saying there is any meaningful amount of job homogenization in this game is like being a flat earther.

[Carighan]

I agree, saying there is any meaningful amount of job homogenization in this game is like being a flat earther.

/shrug

I mean, sure. Depending on just how limited your experience with MMORPGs at large or FFXIV over its lifetime is (and I started in ShB, so I missed the worst homogenization-steps), sure, yeah, you'd not see a lot of it.

Alternatively if you never attempted to see the similarities between different jobs or how the vast majority can have equivalent hotbar setups, you might not have ever realized just how homogenized things are, although some structural steps such as the 120s burst focus of course remain.

Matter of perspective I imagine. Compared to DAoC in its early most-PvP-centric days, this game was extremely homogenized at launch, nevermind now which is just luducrious. Compared to the effectively inexistent variety in combat handling in something like say, Diablo IV (not an MMO but just to prove a point), yeah sure there's a lot of diversity here.

You're still going to have a very hard time convincing anybody that this excessive homogenization is not the central flaw in FFXIV's combat design right now, though. More power to you if you flat out cannot see it - makes the design less annoying - but it's still there. Again, it really does not care what you believe or don't believe, it just... is.

[OliviaLugria]

They aren't exactly willing to concede anything at all.

They argued that healers having a filler and a 30 second dot was not homogenization.

They'd probably argue sch indom isn't the same as sage indom because sages restores your mp.

[OliviaLugria]

Like... samba, tactician, and troubadour are reskins of the exact same ability and don't stack, but look different so not homogenization.

Rampart is a tank role action but the job does a slightly different animation so not homogenization

[HikariKurosawa]

Like... samba, tactician, and troubadour are reskins of the exact same ability and don't stack, but look different so not homogenization.

Rampart is a tank role action but the job does a slightly different animation so not homogenization

True they should remove role actions because it's homogenization.

I agree that there is "homogenization" in the game, I do not believe it is worth speaking about because it makes the game more balanced and viable. When people talk about it, they act like every job is becoming the same, when that's clearly not the case. It comes across as very disingenuous and it's good to know where people are coming from. I didn't make this thread to argue, I just wanted to understand what people meant when they said this game has a homogenization problem or jobs are becoming more and more similar.

I think a lot of the posts in this forums are just blizzard shills trying to criticize FFXIV for not being more like WoW.

[Carighan]

I agree that there is "homogenization" in the game, I do not believe it is worth speaking about because it makes the game more balanced and viable. When people talk about it, they act like every job is becoming the same, when that's clearly not the case. It comes across as very disingenuous and it's good to know where people are coming from.

Honestly, are you this standoffish IRL, too? :') If you just wanted to bait people to flame them, you could have done that on 4chan or so.

But hey, if you don't feel the amount of homogenization is irrelevant, more power to you. This makes for 20+ jobs you can play instead of what some others here (me included though maybe to a stronger degree than others) feel is more like 6-8 effective jobs, everything else is just variations of existing designs marginally pieces together differently. Like those mirror-characters in Smash Bros, Mario, Luigi and Dr Mario are all similar in overall design, with just variations. While they are differently for top-level play, the underlying approach to using them is the same, and that's what playing any tank after you played any other tank, what playing any melee after playing any other melee (except Viper) feels like. Casters and PRanged get huge bonus points for holding up the unique-implementation flags here, but they're the only thing doing that. Tanks, Healers and Melee are near-100%-homogenized by now, allowing a single button scheme to be used to elicit a near-identical flow of finger movement during your rotation. Healers in particular have it even worse because even the non-typesharing healers (Astro vs Sage vor example) share so many conceptual similarities (and a certain amount of homogenization is expected for an in-theory reaction-based class, don't get me wrong) that you can do the same setup!
Like in my case: Nuke on 1, Shift+1 is AoE nuke. 2 is the DoT, or Eukrasia on Sage because that's what it comes down to. 3 is the instant GCD heal. 4 is the casted GCD heal. Shift + 3 is the instant AoE GCD heal. Shift + 4 is the casted GCD AoE heal. G is the instant oGCD heal. Shift+G is the instant oGCD AoE heal. And so on, and so forth. Yeah sure the abilities are all marginally different but my brain can do the exact same decisions to play these jobs for virtually all of their existence, the only differentiation comes with something like Astro cards vs Sage Phlegma because the former is on a 1:1 burst cycle, the latter on a 2:1 cycle, the former also needs 6 oGCDs to resolve during burst, the latter needs 2. But that's as far as things get unique.

Then add all the non-job homogenization: Positionals are usually 1 per cycle-set now, for two per entire rotational loop on a melee (usually 1 side + 1 rear, Monk breaks the mold with a 2:1 here). Melee vs ranged has become near-entirely unimportant in bossfights to ease balance between the types of DPS. Utilize has been mudflated, with all melees having gapclosers even the tanks for example. Raid utility has been simplified into simple defensive boosts as boss fights have situations with forced mitigation requirements. Selectable archetype abilities have been - rightfully, no argument from me there >.> - removed. Emnity no longer really exists as a concept, leading to non-tanky tank gameplay. Mana is a non-concept on all but two-ish jobs (Dark Knight and Black Mage, and in ultra-rare cases Red Mage, granted).

You can make a far longer list than that, but post size limits...

[Commander_Justitia]

they act like every job is becoming the same, when that's clearly not the case

Know 1 tank, know all.