Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
From my view, I think a difficult part of adding truly unique abilities for different jobs is the way they can potentially imbalance fights, and SE has been big on trying to prevent certain jobs from being "required" or locked out by the community because of their skill set (that hasn't stopped it from happening due to potency imbalances, but those are much more easily correctable). I think back to my WoW days when a particular raid fight had an add phase that was completely trivialized by Mass Dispel. But only Shadow Priests and Blood Elves had that ability. The fight favored Horde raiders because only they could be Blood Elves, while Alliance groups virtually *had* to bring a Shadow Priest to clear the fight. Personally, I'd rather have jobs feeling more "similar" than situations like the WoW example popping up in FFXIV.
A sensible balance when it comes to utility versus favoritism can be thought out. There is a way to do it, because WoW nowadays have that much better than the time of the example you mentioned. Yes, there is still a certain level of homogenization in WoW's class gameplay (far less than in XIV), but I think they managed to reach a point where this selectivity only happens in really cutting edge content, and even when it does, it's rarely just one single spec pick of the utility you need.

But for that to even be considered, the encounters in XIV got to potentially support a more distinct array of utilities.