Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
The issue becomes without balance, people will force out certain jobs worse than they already do. This happened in FFXI and happens in WoW frequently. If you play a gimped job, it's basically considered worthless. Adding to these problems is people are going to determine the mathematically superior build and outside slight deviations from it, you will be expected to use said build in harder content. Customization is ultimately an illusion.
that depends. In FFXI for example the issue with a lot of jobs was not the jobs themselves but the enviroment. many of those jobs that were lolled at not because they were considered weak but because of the way in which the enviroment worked. pet jobs for example were generally pretty damn strong but the reason they were often lolled is becasue they fed bosses and mobs so much tp they made fights harder than they needed to be.. this is why even dragoons were lolled. a lot of mobs were weak to piercing damage which would have been ideal for a dragoon but there pets fed so much tp to bosses that they were often shunned.

just changing the way mobs were fed tp within the enviroment would have practically eliminated the lolling of the all of those jobs. without any actual adjustments to the jobs themselves... and thus many of the jobs would have been better balanced just by making that one enviromental change..

if you adjusted the mob variety at the higher levels (pre abyssea) then you would have gone a long way to making casters more desirable. they were generally only shunned at higher levels because virtually every mob at those levels would either silence you, give you amnesia or reflect any magic attacks back at your party.. all of which destroyed casters in higher end parties. again could have been fixed with an enviromental adjustment...

A good enviroment creates balance on its own.. the best and easiest example of this wouldbefirst person shooters. where you might have a guy with close quarters shotguns / smgs. and a guy with a high powered sniper rifle... both of these people have distinctly different strengths and weaknesses and thus it is the enviroment that creates the balance.. a wide open desert for example that sniper is gonna be so over powered the guy with a shotgun wouldnt even stand a chance... however an enviroment such as an office block or something the sniper is going to be at a distinct disadvantage over the other guy... so if you create an enviromnet that encorporates both. you achieve balance.

racing games are another example. you can have super fasst cars that dont handle so great and slower cars with much better handling and traction... in a drag race it's obvious the super fast car will win. on windy backroads though its likely to lose.. so balance is achieved through the enviroment and intelligent track design...

IF XIV hadnt simplified its enviroment so much it could have made jobs incredibly diverse and use the enviroment to achieve balance.. but it's been dumbed down and simplified so much that DPS is literally the only thing that ever matters