Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
The problem with encounter difficulty is that it tends to act in a very binary way: you either succeed or fail mechanics. Jobs and the battle system though? You can add enough depth that a player that wants a bit more out of the system can actually play with levers that are totally optional for clearance otherwise.
In my experience, this is also false. Because encounter difficulty and job complexity are not mutually exclusive. At the end of the day, cookie cutter playstyles and builds will always win out no matter how complex a class plays because the end-goal is to clear the content in the best way possible.

Builds aren’t something that really applies to this game, but the meta absolutely does.

We went through this in WoW. They used to have pretty complex and layered talent trees for each class that Blizzard gutted because raiders and PvPers had meta builds that were considered to be required to clear content or for arena comps.

They’ve since revamped the talent trees but it didn’t take long for “mandatory” builds to appear again.

What you call levers that are totally optional is the illusion of choice. There will always be levers that are mandatory. The rest will just be “Oh yeah, I forgot I had those!”