Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Acidblood]

I don't understand how people keep mistaking that for some sort of flawed system only to then ask for the very things hard enrages already provide and which the removal of hard enrages would in turn remove. Hard enrages encourage survival. Hard enrages encourage damage. They just allow you to perfect your performance over time without smashing your head against one particular mechanic at a time, all while ensuring that by the time you can complete the fight, you feel like you deserved it, i.e. that you had a decent handle on the mechanics involved.

Because in reality hard enrages do not encourage survival, they make it binary; either you can survive until the end (hard enrage) or you can't, any boost to 'survival' beyond that is wasted (especially if it comes at the expense of damage). And since failure isn't allowed by default*, and all combinations of jobs must to be viable**, survival stats and abilties generally aren't even a consideration to begin with (expect perhaps at the start of prog where you are just trying to see as much of the fight as possible).

* And even if failure was allowed by default; i.e. you couldn't beat encounter A without X Tenacity, people would just get X+1 Tenacity and dump the rest into damage stats, which is same issue Accuracy had.

** If Job-X had a survival ability that was 'required' (or perceived to be required) to beat encounter A then everyone else of that role would complain. However; if that ability is not required and Job-X sacrifices damage just to have that ability (used or not) then Job-X will be seen as less valuable, or even 'useless', compared to another job of the same role that brings more damage; enter homogenisation, the systematic removal of anything that isn't 'damage', and the death of job identity.