Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Acidblood]

When you remove the hard enrage you remove any reason to perform any mechanic except to the extent that you survive that mechanic and that mechanic alone. There is no interconnectedness. There is no lingering consequence. Survival in each mechanic becomes even MORE binary. There are no degrees of risk-reward. There is no need to find a balance between the two.

A hard enrage is precisely what makes it so you don't need only to survive to the end (hard enrage) or not. Running around like headless chickens simply will not get you through mechanics. You can have a party that's bad at one mechanic or two and have to completely divert their focus for it or come up with strategies that favor mitigating risk (survival) over facilitating reward (uptime) and a hard enrage will allow for that leniency on those few mechanics so long as you can perform the others sufficiently well.

Neither gameplay with or without a hard enrage will ever reward you for overhealing or overmitigation. Ever. You would need to incorporate a gimmick 'deep damage' mechanic or the like whereby players are temporarily crippled if reduced to critical HP or whatnot. The only difference you'll get from removing hard enrages is the ability to average out your performance check over multiple mechanics, to recover over the course of other mechanics what you struggle with on one or few particular mechanics.

Given the current state of the combat system, where the party effectively has infinite resources, and DPS loss (including death) is the only real penalty that mechanics can apply, I would agree. The downside is of course that the system inherently lacks depth*, and what little it may have will probably, over time, be removed in the name of 'balance' (see: this forum and the progression of combat in FFXIV so far).

Which is OK (I guess), but without any depth (e.g. a spectrum of party compositions) content gets stale extremely quickly and a constant stream of new, well designed and (hopefully) engaging content is required to keep the game afloat**.

* Don't confuse complexity (e.g. the current stat system, or a new boss mechanic) for depth (or simplicity for the lack of it), complexity will always get boiled down in time but if there is no real choice underlying it then there is no depth.

** Again, this is OK (I guess) but it means putting a lot of resources into constant content regeneration, resources that (arguably) could have been better spent elsewhere, such as making Diadem not so... umm, yeah. It also risks content becoming copy / paste (see: FFXIV dungeons, and even to an extent trials and raids).

If job identity causes one tank to deliberately sacrifice all but 1 hp, then let it die.

Otherwise, this tank uses a gunblade, that tank uses a sword and shield. This ranged DPS shoots arrows, that ranged DPS dances. This caster summons egis, that caster attacks from near and far. All these melee DPS use positionals differently.

Those differences are sufficient for job identity.

Wow, so are we really down to cosmetics and pushing buttons in a slightly different order?