Quote Originally Posted by TheDustyOne View Post
In regards to the job identity criticisms, it largely has to do with attitudes like these:

Effectively this ends up sounding like:

Different jobs within a role aren't allowed to do things in a way that's different from the other jobs in that role, because that might mean it has certain downsides, upsides, and quirks that set it apart. Roles are only ever meant to be something set in stone and never have deviations in how they function.
I respectfully disagree - because we can clearly see the end result of your argument. We have ended up with roles who all are expected to do DPS, and since there is no longer any meaningful separation of tank\healer\dps\support, jobs now get so so much self-healing or damage\debuffs we might as well just replace all the dungeons with one-mans and call it day. What's even the point of having a party with different "roles"?

I don't know when this attitude shifted, but it was pretty recently, because I don't remember ever hearing complaints in FFXI that jobs like White Mage didn't do enough damage in enough interesting ways. It certainly wasn't expected - if it happened it was a bonus. Loads of complaints over there, but killing the uniqueness of each role was never an actual player request.

Part of the problem is limiting party size to 4 - to this day I have no idea why they made this design decision. It means you HAVE to limit the party to 1 tank 1 healer and 2 DPS instead of tank, healer, mix of DPS and support as we liked when we had 6 man parties in XI.

The other part is an aversion to the hard work of balancing. Teams are getting so squeezed and talent is getting shed left and right - it's no wonder so many of these tasks seem out of reach for the team that's left... So we get systems that are a shadow of what they were in this game's predecessor.