Quote Originally Posted by Asari5 View Post
20 jobs in this game... 20!!....

imagine having jobs for different kinds of people.

if you like a difficult job but arent that great with it... combine it with easy content.
if you wanna do difficult content but arent that great... combine it with an easy job.

mindblowing
It might be counterintuitive, but the vast array of classes is in fact why they all have to be ultimately work quite similar.

Because it means difficulty cannot viably be established through class interaction. It's just not realistic. For any given PvE encounter, any balance the devs achieve would either:

* Exclude a vast portion of classes entirely, if balance is aimed at the few classes performing best in this encounter. You are simply expected to, say, bring Pictomancers for FRU. That's what FRU is balanced for, and intentionally no other DPS can produce the DPS needed for this encounter.
* Or, alternatively, you balance for the average or even minimum performance, in which case every group can trivially beat fights by just bringing whoever "overperforms" here. And this is an effect we already see, despite 5%-6% outliers in both directions. Imagine if it were 20%-50% outliers due to mechanical design differences!

This issue, coupled with the frankly inane need (and community desire) for more and more classes, means difficulty has to lie entirely in the encounter. It's the only way to centrally control the difficulty. But to establish this, all jobs of a specific role need to be "flattened", to ensure their perform about equal independent of the context. Look at what a huge problem Picto not fitting that mold was and still is, or how Vipers with their weird faceroll-lulz burst overperform in M6S. These things have to all be taken out. So naturally a job not fitting on the other end - too immobile - also has to be changed. All difficulty must come from the PvE encounters if your game has too many classes unless your community embraces and enjoys intentional irrelevance of some jobs in some contents (EQ1 and DAoC are good examples of this design paradigm).