Why refusing customization is a fallacy

[Duelle]

When people say 'required' they do not (generally) mean literally. Being a suboptimal class won't keep you from 100% of the content, but it will keep you from a good fraction of it and make your gaming life much less fun. This atmosphere leads to frustration and people quitting, which is why they don't make MMO's like this anymore.

This a million times over. Being sub-optimal means you get odd looks from others and more-often-than-not don't "fit in" with the community, which is detrimental in a game genre that is built around people playing together.

PS: Aim customization to be in the vein of aesthetics and you get what you want without messing with game balance.
PPS: To drive my point home, here's some DRG merits I came up with:

Dragoon

General
Light Armor - Allows "of striking/scouting" gear to be glamoured on to of your equipment.
Robes - Allows "of casting/healing" gear to be glamoured on to your equipment.
Working Clothes - Allows DoL-specific gear to be glamoured on to your equipment.
Manufacturing Attire - Allows DoH-specific gear to be glamoured on to your equipment.
The Blue Gale - Allows access to a new hairstyle via the aesthetician (a long, thin ponytail)

Category 1
Bloody Trade - Adds blood particles to all your attacks while under the effect of Blood for Blood.
Temple Smash - Replaces Leg Sweep with Temple Smash (hit the target's head with the butt of the spear). Same effect, different animations.
High Jump - Replaces Elusive Jump. Jump off-screen instead of backflipping. Same effect, different animation.
Dragon Spirit - While under the effect of Blood of the Dragon, an ethereal dragon will hover around you.

Category 2
Highwind's Stand - Persistent Emote. Assume a pose associated with a famous azure dragoon.
Mounted Jump - Jump off your mount on to target enemy. Shares a cooldown with Jump. Cannot be used in PvP.
Leaps and Bounds - Increase the height and range of your jumps (the ones you perform pressing the space bar) and negates falling damage. Each jump consumes 50 TP. Effect ends upon reuse or having enmity/attacking mobs/taking damage.
Draconic Ward - Channeled effect. Creates a glowing mark at your feet with the DRG symbol for 10 seconds.

Note: Leaps and Bounds is basically a travel power of sorts. I got the idea from how Estinien just leaps around easily along with the DRGs seen in the opening cinematic, and is based on the Super Jump movement power from City of Heroes

[Reynhart]

Being sub-optimal means you get odd looks from others

What others ?

The people in Duty finder who won't care as long as everything go smootlhy even if you're not the ultra top DPS they'd like you to be ?
Or the friends who play with you, who know perfectly how you want to play for fun and that it's enough to clear 90% of the content, even at launch ?
Or the people in Party Finder, that you will probably avoid simply because they'll refuse 1st timers on day one and kick you at the 1st mistake ?

And again, apart from Alex Savage, we'll overgear every content pretty soon. Look at ARR. At launch, the best gear was ilvl90.
It allowed you to enter every instance up to Turn 6, released 6 months later.

By the time "casual" content required such a high item level, everybody was around ilvl 120 or higher. Who cares if your BLM isn't perfectly speced if you can roll on content by gear only ?

The real fallacy is pretending that game balance is only important for hardcore raiders. As I've said elsewhere:

If you're not a raider, chances are you'll do most of your content either on Duty Finder or with people you know. That is to say, instances where people don't care what job you are as long as you know how to play it.

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

As I said, "Best In Slot" is a real thing in FFXIV, yet it could be the first form of discrimination.

[Gilthas]

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

No, FFXI is proof that you're wrong.

FFXI's classes were an unbalanced mess, which is why so many jobs were discriminated against for pretty much all party content, not just hardcore raiding.

Job balance is important for everyone, stop trying to pretend that only hardcore raiders care about it because that's a blatant lie.

[KaedrianLiang]

No, FFXI is proof that you're wrong.

FFXI's classes were an unbalanced mess, which is why so many jobs were discriminated against for pretty much all party content, not just hardcore raiding.

Job balance is important for everyone, stop trying to pretend that only hardcore raiders care about it because that's a blatant lie.

Tanks were even more scarce then than in ffxiv. So scarce that i was in a position to decline any party invite. LOL at the rage that follows after declining though :Q

Those unwanted classes were desperate for exp.

[Duelle]

Things as designed right now are tuned well enough that you don't have glaring issues between the jobs. The closest thing to that in recent memory was BRD and MCH at launch, where people would cringe at having them around since they convinced themselves the group's DPS went down just from having them in the group.Balance between jobs matters regardless of the level of content. Any trends formed at endgame trickle down to the rest (see: WARs being told they couldn't tank past HM Garuda when the issue for WARs was turn 4 of coil). Trying to use gear progression as an excuse to throw balance to the wind outside of raiding is short-sighted and doesn't do anything to help your argument.

And even if you continue to ignore it, I'll reiterate: the type of customization that would work alongside preserving balance is in the form of aesthetics. Spell effects, flavor abilities and replacement abilities would go along way in helping develop job individualism without messing with class balance.

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

It's an excellent example of what would happen if the devs went along with you. Most of what happened there was a combination of bad design and human nature. You seem to severely underestimate the latter or are just oblivious to the consequences for some reason.

[Fynlar]

As anyone who's played FFXI could probably tell you, customization is a myth. Hell, even bonus stat allocation in this game is something that's largely unnecessary to have, because the majority of the classes really only have one worthwhile choice, which isn't really much of a choice at all.

What would end up happening (because this happens in *every* game that allows customization) is that the bean counters will find out what has the greatest overall practical/statistical benefit, and then everyone will have to run that particular setup or they will be gimp as hell. It's merely an illusion of choice.

[Kazama]

PS: Aim customization to be in the vein of aesthetics and you get what you want without messing with game balance.

This negative a million times over. Many of us have absolutely no care whatsoever about aesthetics. What the hell is wrong with gamers these days... has all the console "DLC Skin" garbage gone to your heads this bad? What is fun about glamouring your character? Seriously, how is this even entertaining in the slightest? You click a button and you look different WOOOOOW such excitement! I do that every day when I put my clothes on...

Personally, your PS sounds to me like getting none of what I want an even more of what I couldn't care less about. I'm going to go ahead and say, it's players like you who are destroying this genre of games. It's all turning into Barbie Dress Up Party 2015

As far as the OP is concerned, I'm all for it. Even if it's just fun to try strange builds to solo one fight, options, illusions or reality are always nice to have. People already run around in sub optimal gear and who knows where their stats are allocated sometimes. I mean, we already have lolDRGs running around in full tank gear...

[Sandpark]

You sound like Dennis Leary lol, but I don't care for aesthetics either. What is the saying? Lipstick on a pig? Then to top it off, some of those aesthetics are locked behind dlc content in a bunch of games...

I want customization but I don't think it should come in jobs, only classes. Jobs are designed to fill one role, when they start filling others, all jobs start to feel very similar. In a large group setting, it makes dynamics less interesting. Plus we get less new jobs designed. If the horizontal mambo is done to classes, that will make it still be specialized according to job you play. Then the classes will become like subjobs to the jobs, some locked to certain jobs.
Some new classes should be designed to augment job playstyles in different ways.

Outside focused hard group content. They should remove the cooldown of switching between classes(jobs remained on cooldown). The armoury system was originally built that way. No other game I know of, allows you to swap skills and gear that fast without macros.

Classes= Sandbox experimentation.
Jobs= Themepark ride.