Job Personalization: Can I Have It?

[LandricFrey]

A good bit of discussion going on here. Thanks to everyone who have posted their ideas, concerns, and keeping things civil at the same time!

I'm still convinced that a game where everyone is the same, isn't as fun as it could be. Might as well have just three jobs one for each role so that it is balanced right? Of course not. Can it go too far and make things unbalanced? sure, but this isn't a serious pvp game, and if someone is OP, well that's just better for your group to complete content. There is no real challenge to MMO's, unless you consider mind-numbing time sinks for gear and memorization of mechanics a challenge. Might as well let us have fun with our builds, right?

And if you're serious about raiding and completing less forgiving content, you'd run with a premade of individuals who only take the "best" set of skills/build/whatever. That "snowflake" some speak of, is just someone trying to have fun. Remember that? fun? What games are all about.

Hardcore raiders can be an awesome set of individuals, but be that as it may, they are still the minority, and designing content for the minority, I feel, isn't a good road for SE to go down.

[Gilthas]

Hardcore raiders can be an awesome set of individuals, but be that as it may, they are still the minority, and designing content for the minority, I feel, isn't a good road for SE to go down.

And once again:

I'm hardly a hardcore raider, but balance is very important to me as well as for most of the playerbase, not just raiders. You act like "balance" opposes "fun and interesting", but that's simply not true.

It's not fun when:
- everyone only wants Rangers because their damage is so much better than everyone else's
- Rangers get nerfed into the ground and perform worse than almost everyone else so no one wants them anymore.
- people only want Warriors for their merit parties because they have great damage and good survivability
- no one wants your Dragoon because the community thinks the job is crap
- Black Mages no longer can get regular parties because TP-burns are much better experience
- Puppetmasters are considered a joke job.

And so many other glaring issues that FFXI had because the developers sucked at balancing.

Having unbalanced jobs is bad for everyone. It's bad for the player that likes the job because he gets shunned from most parties, and it's bad for those who don't play the job, because they get stuck with an underperforming job in duties.