Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Aye. That's the thing, though. Because the cost of swapping is so low within a given gear class, especially outside of the period immediately following weapon upgrades, instances need to have enough mechanics that advantage each different job to somehow roughly equal degree.

That is to say, since jobs are essentially just easily swapped "specializations" for the core classes of Fending, Maiming, Striking, Scouting, Aiming, Casting, and Healing, if those advantages are imbalanced over the course of an instance, you lose "spec" choice, but if there are no advantages, those "specs" increasingly feel the same (and the easier to quantify their value becomes, the tighter the parity demanded between jobs becomes in turn).

What's perhaps most disappointing is that XIV predominantly designs towards the latter: there are just virtually no advantaged jobs in the first place, outside of maybe the odd bit of Macrocosmos or Holmgang exploitability. Instead we have "1 mob 90+% of the time, with maybe a set of 4 adds that can all be killed simultaneously," so that no cleave advantage can possibly form significantly and player behaviors need basically never shift with composition.

Flexibility (or, greater control over the timings/rate/dynamics of one's outputs), for instance, could be noticeable utility... if there were things in our fights it could actually advantage (e.g., CDs that would otherwise need to be held --for off-rhythm DPS checks-- among jobs with greater but less flexible max burst).
A number of these issues in FFXIV came to be due to the amount of normal RPG mechanics and elements that have been stripped from the game. Because of this they essentially dug themselves a hole in job design options then fell to the bottom of it as it severely limits what they can actually do with job design without blatantly making certain jobs out perform others in the same role. And even then they've still caused that exact scenario to happen in cases.