Balance, Accessibility, Diversity

[Vulcann]

The issue then becomes how do you offer rewards worthwhile enough for people to do that content? If it's equivalent ilvl to Savage, then people will opt for whatever is the easier of the two.

make savage content drop items or give more currency toward items instead of the other content. and give savage items unique and interesting looks so that people will want to run it for glams. its shown that people will do content for glams with copied factory.

[Satarn]

game starts off with a unique and diverse class lineup
game introduces raiding
raiders complain when specific classes are more useful than others
developers start removing the uniqueness from classes to satisfy raiders
raiders complain more
rinse and repeat.

Your obvious raiders-hate-boner aside, this doesn't even make sense when you look at the history of the game.

FFXIV had raiding pretty much from the very beginning in ARR(1.x doesn't count). I think most people will agree that jobs were at their most diverse back in Heavensward - when raiding was very much there and at its most hardcore to boot. The HW era had something else to it though, specifically in the jobs department - they weren't just diverse, they were also very complex and therefore not all that casual-friendly.

The homogenization of jobs wasn't for balance - it was for accessibility. The more casual part of the playerbase complained about things being too hard, too "clunky" as people often say and in order to appease them, SE started dumbing things down, simplifying and cutting out each job's unique mechanics and as side effect making them less diverse. Then those complaints continued in Stormblood and 5.0 dumbed things down even further.
Those "raid focused" games you speak of - were they not also more and more casual-friendly as the time went by?

Interestingly Eureka - which is as far away from the raid-style content as XIV ever got - came in 4.x and somehow the expansion after adding this new, "refreshing", original, non-raid content, things are getting less and less diverse. We are going to get more Eureka-style content in next patch series and somehow SE didn't give us more unique options in preparation for that, how come? By your logic, Shadowbringers should be when the jobs are at their most-diverse, but alas here we are.

I've said it many times and I'll say it again: balance(and by extension raiders) are concerned with numerical outcomes, which can be equally achieved with as diverse rotations and job mechanics as you could wish for.
Balance and raids are not the issue - that is unless you're really hell-bent on playing a job that's solely focused on non-combat utility like Peloton or decreasing people's fall damage, in which case you should probably look for a different game.

[Recon1o6]

Diversity and balance I think.

My reasoning is that classes should be fun and unique, and THEN balanced. Accessibility will come as classes diverge, some will naturally end up easier than others.
Balance should be secondary, fun is more important than one being more powerful, and while the raiders do have too much say, the problem is that SE is also doing things from the wrong angle so the raiders get more say not because there is more of them but because the alternatives for more casual players have not come about in any decent capacity

Look at Eureka, a massive brain numbing chore of a grind that could have given more casual players a means of getting their gear. Instead because it was so repetitive, slow, burdened with unneccesary restrictions and required FATES for the last bit of the weapon, it was dead on arrival, got brought back to a coma, then died again once pagos came out

If Eureka had been somewhat more varied and not crippled by poor decisions (As was admittedly many things in SB) then it would have been a viable alternative.

the current homogenisation, dumbing down and stripping of core elements and identity of classes in shadowbringers is why this expansion hasn't dethroned heavensward in terms of best expansion

[Vulcann]

Your obvious raiders-hate-boner aside, this doesn't even make sense when you look at the history of the game.

yeah yeah i forgot the egos of raiders can't take any sort of criticism or else that person is dubbed a raid hater. i have raided for 20 years from eq1 all the way to the latest expansion of WoW. so yeah i know how raiding works and i know the effects it has on games. when you focus solely on raid progression when it comes to character balance you can throw the uniqueness of class out the window. its happened in literally every game that has a focus on raiding. sure the "casual" base effects its as well but the larger driving force in every single game with raiding is the "elite raiders"

[Satarn]

yeah yeah i forgot the egos of raiders can't take any sort of criticism or else that person is dubbed a raid hater. i have raided for 20 years from eq1 all the way to the latest expansion of WoW. so yeah i know how raiding works and i know the effects it has on games. when you focus solely on raid progression when it comes to character balance you can throw the uniqueness of class out the window. its happened in literally every game that has a focus on raiding. sure the "casual" base effects its as well but the larger driving force in every single game with raiding is the "elite raiders"

You didn't counter anything I've said with evidence or even remotely convincing arguments though. Pretty much all you do is say "no, that's wrong because I say so, also raiders are bad".
Nobody cares about your EQ or WoW experience, these are different games and you simply saying you have "some sort of" experience, doesn't magically make everything you say true without any evidence and proper arguments. You say raiders can't take criticism because of supposed ego, but it is you who responds to criticism backed by arguments, with a petty insult in the very same sentence and not much else.

How much of the endgame in XIV you've played by the way? Not just raiding, Eureka and deep dungeons too(the upper floors, not story/leveling stuff), since we're talking about alternative content and its effects on job design. From what I'm seeing you've only just joined in SHB, have yet to experience most of the content and haven't researched about past expansions, but you're trying to talk like some sort of authority in the matter of how this game has changed over the years.

Since you claim this is the way to diversify the jobs, can you give some examples of mmorpgs that became more diverse in their class design, after introducing other content alongside raiding? We're talking mmorpgs with raiding specifically, because other game types are irrelevant for XIV design obviously.
You've proposed adding D3 style Rifts - how do you imagine such content allowing for more varied job design in ffxiv specifically, while also being engaging enough that people care to do it?