Probably a dumb idea on class balance.

[Connor]

I feel like the devs are misunderstanding people’s preoccupation with DPS numbers and intentionally designing future content to require pretty much only DPS. And of course, the result is that jobs become highly oversimplified when they all exist solely to deal direct damage( *cough* Bard *cough* ).

The devs release content where DPS is the only thing that will ever matter, then players naturally become focused on DPS because they want to succeed, them the devs see this as ‘players only want to dps’, and release content where nothing else matters. It’s like an endless cycle.

Surely there are ways to add DPS without just relying on basic direct damage attacks. Raid support is the main one, but it’s either all been moved to the one job (Dancer), removed from everything else (except Melee), or given such a heavy DPS tax that nobody wants it (Red Mage).

They’ve tried to address the whole ‘DPS is everything’ mentality that they created intentionally by simplifying every job so it only has to consider DPS outputs.

I think the class balance issues would be solved by giving jobs that are supposed to ‘support’ the party meaningful ways to contribute that haven’t been watered down to the point they’re not worth taking, without just falling back on the ‘lol potency increases to dps’ which honestly is a little lazy in my opinion.

Lastly I don’t think it’s accurate to say defensive abilities can’t contribute to overall raid DPS. Using Bard as an example because the remaining support is has left is almost purely defensive. Nature’s Minne can allow the healers to replace an GCD with an oGCD or just leave it to regens/Minne/shields, creating a DPS gain for healers. Warden’s Paean removes the need for Esuna, saving healers a GCD and removing the potential DPS loss of the status ailment (depending on what it is). Troubadour is self explanatory, less AoE healing = more healer DPS. The only reason nobody cares about these abilities for their support effects is because they’re all on long cooldowns that essentially makes the potential DPS gain redundant (can’t add much healer damage if you can only support them once every 45/90/120 seconds).

Basically, class balance is kinda messed up, they have jobs that are supposed to ‘support the party’ but their personal DPS is too low for that support to be worthwhile. Either that, or the support is oversimplified and made very limited use so that players can focus on personal DPS, meaning that it doesn’t add anything particularly valuable. I think that in trying to simplify every job so maximum personal DPS is easier to achieve, they’ve completely neglected the jobs who were never there for their personal DPS in the first place. Which has resulted in the balancing issues we have now. DPS is definitely more important than anything they will ever add in battle content, invariably, but that doesn’t mean they can’t think of interesting ways to contribute to it outside of just ‘deals’ damage