Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

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.