Two Jobs For Every Class

[Mhaeric]

Oddly enough, the balance issue was more of a thing when you actually leveled up your stats. Now that stats are pretty much 100% gear based, I doubt balance is that much of an issue.

This is categorically incorrect. The only issue that happened back when manual stat improvement was a thing was that you had to choose between 30 stat points going to INT to slightly boost your SMN dps or 30 points to MND to slightly boost your SCH heals. This was not a massive difference and definitely didn't affect balance in any meaningful way. It was annoying, and enterprising players could spend seals to switch between the two if they wanted, but it wasn't much of a balance thing.

The vast majority of one class two job balance issues came from the two jobs sharing skills. When two jobs share a large number of abilities, any change you make related to those abilities, even an indirect one, has to be considered for both jobs and that is hard to balance. In particular because the two jobs have completely different roles. E.g. Scholar having access to Bane, Shadowflare and Miasma 2 made them leaps and bounds ahead of any other healer in terms of DPS, but just reducing the DoT damage would penalize SMN. The fix was that they gradually gave SMN traits to improve their DoT damage, reduced the potency of the base DoT spells without upgrading them for SCH, removed multiple abilities like Bane from SCH, reworked basic mechanics like Aetherflow to function differently for each job, etc. In short, they have continually and gradually divorved the two jobs' skills over the last few expansions making them more and more independent from each other and thus easier to balance. This is also the reason why cross-class skills have gradually been tapered down into the much more limited role-skill system.

Another more extreme example of this is Guild Wars vs. Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars allowed subjobs with almost full access to all of the abilities from both your main and secondary profressions. They explicitly stated the main reason they didn't include any sort of subjob system in GW2 was because it was pretty much impossible to balance. Any change to even a single ability, even a minor change, had to be considered for not just the profession it belonged to but for all of them.