Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
I'm going to disagree with you on one point in particular. Performance is always proportional to practice. You will not be 'more skilled' at a job that you spend less time playing.
Across both XIV and other MMOs with classes/professions/specs/jobs for which even the most obsessive of theory-crafters find far less to optimize in some choices than others...)
Can be. Have been. Will likely continue to, so long as there's that much less to do in one than another.

If a given task has some 6 components, and another shares 4 and then adds 5 more, even if my time is fully devoted to the latter at first, I'm going to learn the second in less than proportional time. Not all tasks award mastery in precisely the same time.

But you're not going to become the world's best dragoon player by playing it less than your competition.
...No one's made any argument remotely to the contrary -- only that, yes, some tasks are quicker to learn than others.

That's true even with equal levels of initial familiarity with those and similar tasks. A 4-step computation will be simpler than a 12-step one. And if a person, AI, or what have you can optimize or get very near to optimizing checkers in far less time than chess then, yes, checkers is probably simpler to optimize than chess.

It's possible that, if you had the ideal player who could play all jobs mathematically perfectly, they would find some jobs easier to achieve that with than others. But that player doesn't exist.
It doesn't need to. There need only be jobs that take less learning time with which to reach a level necessary to clear the content they want to do for those jobs to increasingly push out any more difficult jobs on the basis of the latter set being a poor time investment. You just went over the flipside of this.

So rather than officially sanctioning a particular job as being higher rDPS because it is 'officially more difficult', just level the playing field and refuse to officially take a stance on 'difficulty'.
Taking a stance that "difficulty shouldn't factor into balance," though, is effectively "there should be no reward for further challenge" which in turn pushes out a larger set of jobs. The larger point of balance should be the perceived freedom to play whatever you want, no? That would have the opposite effect.

By all means, let the jobs that have the least going on get more to do, and "level the playing field" that way, but else you're just replacing one largely incidental imbalance (balance for the sake of freedom of choice) with a deliberately worse one (balancing for freedom of choice only for those who have the luxury of knowing how to play each job perfectly and are actively seeking additional challenge even if it has no reward).

The focus should be on designing actions and fights that allow for more variety in skill expression. Interesting movement abilities. Fights with more movement and positioning.
I'm all for more interesting movement abilities (though a good half or more of their interest has traditionally come from how they work around one's rotation -- how to trim one cycle of a rotation in order to align a movement opportunity to its need).

That said, the less the game provides of interest even on, say, a striking dummy, the less each developer hour spent towards fight design is effectively worth.

Worse, you still leave barren everything leading up to those modern, more idealized (and more development-costly) fights.

Nor are designing kits with depth somehow zero-sum with designing good encounters. Simplifying toolkits doesn't stop role-based tasks, encounters' mechanical variety, etc., to not be likewise gutted.