Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Connor]

Surely it makes more sense for them to just develop the jobs how they want and let the player(s) decide to themselves which is ‘easy’ and which is ‘hard’. It seems a bit too subjective to me to balance them around something like difficulty.

I’ve seen people say Bard is the most complex job in the game which I honestly find unfathomable, I honestly find Dancer more complex with managing Fan Dances lol. But then I’ve also been playing (complaining about) Bard since like 1.23 when it came out, so that’s probably a big factor in why I find it the easiest job in the game.

I feel like balancing jobs around arbitrary ‘difficulty’ levels just ends up with a situation where the ‘easy but weak’ jobs aren’t worth using. They should be designed around offering different gameplay experiences and letting players gravitate towards what they find easiest / most comfortable / w/e. That’s how I feel anyway. Plus there’s the RDM vs SMN thing. If Summoner is the ‘easy’ level job, why does it deal more overall damage than the ‘medium’ tier Red Mage? If Red Mage is the ‘easy’ level job, why does it have more complexity than Summoner (well, arguably lol, but then that’s kind of my point).

Basically, the categorisation they’re balancing jobs around is inherently flawed because the jobs within don’t actually adhere to the ‘sliding scale of difficulty’ they’ve tried to create. Giving jobs ‘difficulty tiers’ just gives people a reason to exclude one side or the other (i.e only wanting easy jobs for an easy time with mechanics, only wanting hard jobs for parse runs etc).