Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Lyth]

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While everyone will have their own personal experiences of what they consider to be 'easy' and 'difficult', I don't think this is something that the dev team should ever offer an 'official' commentary on. The problem with the mindset that 'this job is officially harder to play, therefore is more powerful' is that you have the dev team officially sanctioning a balance discrepancy. Which means that players aren't going to want to play or take the officially sanctioned weaker job.

The entire point of having job variety is to let players find a job design that clicks with them. As an example, I personally don't find any of the current healers or magical ranged dps jobs to be interesting. But if you offered me the right job design, like a melee-based healer (Quarterstaff please) or perhaps a DoT focused Void Mage, I wouldn't mind swapping roles for an expansion just for the experience. It keeps the game fresh when you're playing it for 10+ years. If I had to main tank for another expansion I would have definitely burnt out.

Now if you turned around and said this same job is 'officially' easier to play as per the dev team, and therefore will always be underpowered when played optimally, it might as well not exist. Why would I invest my time into a job that the dev team is deliberately making inferior to the alternatives? I generally ignore the discussion around 'complexity' because it's rubbish and only gets trotted out by players to defend balance inequities when they aren't confident in their own ability to perform in a fair fight. But when you have a dev team supporting those inequities it's significantly worse, because you know those privileged jobs will never lose their advantage.

This is also the crux of why players get annoyed at the sub-role balance within DPS. Physical ranged players don't stop and cast spells, so therefore they are 'officially' intended to be 'inferior' to magical ranged. This is such an absurd design mindset. I think the proc design on ranged jobs is actually really interesting. But why would I ever waste my time playing a sub-role that is officially sanctioned as weaker, and only gets brought to fill a mandatory slot on the roster?

I understand that not everyone wants to necessarily challenge themselves. But that's why performance within a job is always variable. And that's why you design job mechanics such that you're still rewarded for playing effectively, but not overly punished for making mistakes. You could argue that there's a case to make for Talent Trees if you want to create a 'less punishing' version of a job that has less inherent risks in the rotation, but either way it should be an internal option within the job that lets you still be competitive if you want to be.