Feedback for the devs on their over-fixation with job balance and homogenization

[Jeeqbit]

They used to be fine with AST being difficult and even talked about it. They used to talk about jobs being unique and this being the most important factor. Starting around Shadowbringers, that changed and they became less interested in job identity and being unique and more interested in making them intuitive and easy to play. I stopped seeing words to the effect of "unique" being mentioned in interviews as well.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for classes to be intuitive to play nor is it necessarily a bad thing for them not to be overwhelming to play, but some of it has gone a bit too far. I felt that Astrologian was fine when Shadowbringers released but with Lord/Lady now just being a heal and a damage attack with no interaction with the other cards and only working toward a personal buff, it's less fun. The amount of cards that had to be juggled when Shadowbringers released was a lot but it was fun. I felt like I was actually juggling in an alliance raid and barely had time to focus on mechanics.

They will rarely leave something as it is, such as the final 4.0 trial at level 70 on Stormblood's release.

Can you elaborate? All that happened is our item level increased from 270 to 400 over the course of the expansion. The Echo gets added to old content and this isn't specific to the 4.0 trial. We have had a lot of potency increases and stat changes over time. But except for P8S I don't remember any nerfs since midas.

Dark knight lost its unique gameplay with skills like the original Dark Missionary, Sole Survivor, and Blood Price - and they no longer had to manage MP, which made it stand out from the other tanks.

It does manage MP. You have to save enough MP for The Blackest Night, while spending enough on Edge of Shadow to not overcap. This becomes braindead once you are used to it, but it's still MP management.

All tanks had their similar defensive cooldowns boiled into role actions.

Tanks always had homogenized mitigation. Going back to ARR, Paladin had Rampart, Sentinel and Hallowed Ground while Warrior had Thrill of Battle, Vengeance and Holm Gang. Their functions were not exactly the same but they achieved the same effect. Dark Knight released and had Shadow Skin, Shadow Wall and Living Dead. They all had a misc flavor mitigation that was trash, a tank stance, a ranged pull attack, an enmity aoe and an enmity combo with some form of damage reduction debuff they could apply which is now replaced with Reprisal. That's a lot of homogenization that they had, but it's what they had in addition to all that which made them unique. So being homogenized is fine if there is some uniqueness on the top of it.

The problem is that a lot of the uniqueness they had was trash. Paladins had Shield Swipe, Bulwark, Awareness (to prevent crits), Convalesence (to increase incoming heal potency), no attack potency on their enmity aoe, no aoe attack at all except Circle of Scorn. Paladins had to aim their shield at enemies for a chance to block physical attacks. Most of this sort of mitigation was what we would spit upon or useless against magic. Nice against dungeon trash but it was all RNG mitigation.

Warrior had Foresight (which raised physical defense based on the defense stat so it was not really a priority to use), Raw Intuition (which parried all physical attacks from the front in exchange for crits from behind which people would cross-class Awareness from Paladin for), a dot separated from the rotation, an attack you can only use when the enemy is at 20% health.

During Heavensward the idea of parry and how it was useless on tank busters was attacked so much that they almost completely got rid of it from everything in Stormblood and made Paladin's blocks work on magic. The concept of cross-class was also in question because we had lots of useless abilities available through it that weren't buffed by traits and the system had been abandoned, so that went away and was replaced with what people were asking for, Role Actions (which you can argue is a form of homogenization). The result of getting rid of useless mitigation like parry was that Raw Intuition was homogenized to be like Rampart (the crit penalty had been ignored all this time by cross-classing Awareness so that went too).

My point is, a lot of the homogenization of tanks actually happened in response to player feedback and players were happy when it happened because their feedback had been listened to. It's only after a while that people started forgetting it was in response to player feedback and began attacking SE for it.

Scholar had its DPS spells gutted, with Eos and Selene dumbed down into identical copies of one another.

People just chose one and stuck with it a lot of the time anyway.

The summoner rework is emblematic of this entire philosophy of dumbing down the jobs in favor of...what, exactly?

The reaction to the EW job actions trailer probably sums it up. I enjoy SMN as it is now. It's actually a summoner.

Multiple melee jobs had their positionals cut down and others suffered skill removals for the sake of avoiding "bloat" (SAM - Kaiten).

I agree that wasn't necessary.