Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
It might be counterintuitive, but the vast array of classes is in fact why they all have to be ultimately work quite similar.
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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.
Respectfully, thats bollocks. Making things balanced does not mean homogenization and pushing every bit of difficulty into the encounter. It is much more work and definitely harder to balance the classes if they are not homogenized and each bring something unique to the table, yes absolutely, cause that means developing encounters with every class in mind and not just 5 roles.
But that does not absolve Square Enix from their product, since it is their job to figure this out. We are paying them to figure this out. They have a veritable army of game designers at hand, being such a massive studio with years and years of expertise in game design and development. However, from the credits, job design team is still just 4 or 5 people strong.

Homogenization and job simplification/shallowfication/however you want to call it is simply the easiest and laziest way to achieve some resemblance of balance, but balance does not require either of those things.