Honestly, you can blame the Armory system for the difficulty in balancing and preventing stacking.

In other MMOs, the reason parties are diverse is for a few reasons:

1. You can't switch jobs. You can switch your role, but they are for completely different purposes (Healing/DPS/Tanking). Sure someone will say something like "Unholy spec is better than Frost", but overall, you are not being forced to a whole other class in general.

2. Other MMO's are more gear dependent. In these fights, a well geared player will survive and perform substantially more DPS than someone without as much gear. In FFXIV, besides BLM, stacking up stats are truly minimal at most and FFXIV overall is more ability/skill dependent.

3. Requirements to win the fight add difficulty to ranged, mage, and melee. Other MMOs (If you can't tell by now, I am mainly referencing to WoW) make conditions that make it difficult for the whole party, not just people near the boss. Right now, FFXIV only punishes players who are too close to the boss. Chimera is an example. He is hard enough without the poison being applied and that one large thunder attack people had to find a small exploit to avoid.

4. FFXIV simply makes other jobs more convenient than others. BLM and WAR have access to many AoE abilities while DRG and MNK only get one real AoE attack that is on a large timer. You either need to tone down AoE on those jobs by making the AoE powerful, but the damage number divides by how many enemies you hit, or you need to give DRG/MNK more AoE usability. The first option makes it so DPS is on par with the other jobs, but it is hitting all enemies at once. Like WAR takes everything down slowly with AoE, but DRG and MNK take one by one down faster, matching the speed it takes for a WAR to take all of them down.

Not exactly the best idea, and a bunch of flaws I know, but just an idea that could be twisted around to possibly work.

5. All classes bring something to the table. In WoW, all classes have some special buff or debuff that really benefits the party. Rather it be a Paladin's King buff, a Hunter's Mark of the Wild, a Death Knight's Horn of Winter, and so on. These buffs being a lot to the party, and why most raids have people seeking at least one of every class in a group. Bard is FFXIV's answer to this, but other jobs should have passive traits that benefit the party in a way that doesn't affect the Bard.

6. Other MMO's push you in the right direction on what to do. They give you dungeon journals and tell you what ability mobs use and how you can avoid them. Bosses are still difficult despite this, but your group has a better idea of what is going on and work with it instead of constantly dieing to the next surprise. SE throws you in completely blindfolded and because of this, people just watch the forums and sees how the first LS to beat it does it, and does it exactly like that. I am not saying give us a full strategy, I am saying give us a push in the right direction. Class stacking happens to the ignorant.




Said as much as I could. FFXIV can't make something out of everything I said, but they need to find a real balance and solution to influence diversity. Hopefully they will find a semi-solution by 2.0, but who knows.