Quote Originally Posted by Bole View Post
People keep saying this, but summoner and samurai were quite popular in Shadowbringers too. I don't personally care that the current SMN exists, but nothing like the previous playstyle of SMN exists anymore - that was more fun for me.

The way I think of homogenization is that "does repeating this content as another job (within the same role) change my experience", often the answer is no. It's partly because the jobs are easy but also party because they're similar. Some aspects of the jobs are different (timed heals on AST, self healing on WAR/TBN on DRK), but the majority of your role is still similar (kitchen sink this TB, weave a heal between DPS buttons). Other games build an identity around certain job mechanics, for example tanks that tank primarily by evading damage, healers who specialize in stacking regens or ramping up their bursty heals (current healer toolkits have a little bit of everything, for example closest thing to this is SCH being a pet healer, but only a small part of its kit interacts with the pet).

EDIT: Another example, SGE. As a DPS-based healer, do you ever feel like "I must DPS here to maintain my healing" - no, you still just heal by using cooldowns similar to scholar.
At the very very least at least at least energy drain correctly encourages you to focus on the fairy heals which is about the last shred of good design in the healer space

If energy drain didn’t exist then SCH would just dump down sacred soil for everything like SGE does with kerechole, having energy drain be the opportunity cost and making whispering dawn have such a short range really does make you actually consider the fairy even if there are only actually 6 skills+ embrace that actually interact with the fairy directly