Honest question: If every player/class/job is equal,who is unique? (Gameplay topic)

[Aegis]

And you don't see anything wrong with having the same pieces of gears for years on end ?

Honestly? Not even a little bit. That piece of gear would take years to obtain. 6 mo to level your first job was pretty typical. Most people wouldn't have full Homam (for example) until years after when they started. Or Byakko's Haidate until they have been farming sky for months. The piece of gear was something you were proud of, something you built your gearset around. When next coil comes around, HA will have been BIS for what? 6 months? And you will be able to get gear better than it from whatever new tomes they release. One of these systems sounds rewarding to me, the other is like a cat chasing a mouse on a string.

If you find that boring, then the whole get 100% TP, pop cooldowns and use Weapon Skills style of FFXI must have been a snore fest to you.

Is that all you remember from XI. You don't remember organising skill chains and magic bursts? Setting up SATAs, BRD maintaining 4 or 5 song rotations? Samurais and Blue Magics Self-SC'ing? The list can go on and on. It sounds like you're pretty jaded about XI.

That's just lore. Otherwise it's just all the same.
Ancient magics are just like normal spell except longer casting time and piss poor damage compared to MP cost.
Blue mage spells are just spells, except the way you get them from monsters and how you allocate them. You have the damage spells, the healing spells, some utility ones and that's it.
Ninja is not the best evasion class because Thief is the one with more evasion bonus traits. And everybody had the utsusemi.
If you are talking about melee DPS in FFXI, everybody is just in autoattack while waiting for TP to do TP attack

Yeah, Ancient Magics weren't particularly well used, but a team of BLMs were used to sleep/nuke down mobs that were melee resistant or otherwise dangerous. BLM were also the DD of choice for SKillchains/Magic Burst

Blue Magic was very, very different to other magics. They followed not only the elemental wheel, but also the monster afinity chart (this was why MP Drainkiss for example was extremely effective on Colibri), they weren't affected by magic reflection abilities, they could be used as either part of a self-skillchain or a magic burst on that same skillchain. More than just that, they were spells with the shortest cast times, aimed to be used in melee combat. Saying they were the same as other spells means you are either forgetting how they actually were or are deliberately misrepresenting them.

And as for the melee DD, they all played very differently. Thieves were pulling mobs, orgainising the rest of the party into SATA positions. Dancers were using steps, sambas and flourishes along with their weaponskills, DRG were subbing mages and using healing breaths to solo mobs other jobs just couldn't. RDM were solo'ing gods.

So much more variety in roles.