Quote Originally Posted by Kurogaea View Post
14 doesn't really allow much of free reign of situations like battles and story. As much as I'd want it, "balance" is always a word they'd use.
Sorry to take this tangentially, but just a pet-peeve, so please allow me this one rant.

Balance isn't a limiter for breadth or depth of gameplay. It's what lets it actually happen.

The sad thing is when a company lacks ambition, and avoids depth purely so that the latter half of conceptualization, balance, is easier. (In which case, the question often comes to mind "why bother with any of it?") Balance doesn't kill specs, or modes, or content types. Lacking quality of development does, and the way it most often shows is by an inability to keep in mind the gritty mathematical realities that produce a concept even while developing it. It's far faster to craft new gameplay from the intricacies of current optomization, tweaking its bits for a result that feels quite different, or even to lay out various changes that would concretely work towards the new paradigm you want, than to throw out a new idea and only afterwards math it out, likely finding parts of the plan fundamentally flawed due to oversights. Working with balance in mind does not hamper development; it merely reduces wasted time. It's working with an overly narrow view of what balance should be that constricts concepts.

When you want a reason to save a given CD, buff, or environmental tool, there's a computation for that, such that the choice becomes optimal. If you still want the other option as well, you run the equation to result in only a slight advantage to the the new playstyle, leaving both viable until you're, say, attempting to clear a pre-nerf A4S in i190 gear.

/rant

....
In all other ways I agree with your above post.