Combat system is beyond saving.

[ty_taurus]

It’s so bizarre to me that a game that lets you change jobs whenever you want continues to eradicate play styles in the effort to make all jobs the same. Do you like positionals? Gone. Do you like DOTs? Gone. Do you like pet management? Limited job only. Do you like RNG? Getting purged with each expansion. Do you like offensive healers? Gone. Do you like aggro management? Gone.

[KisaiTenshi]

It’s so bizarre to me that a game that lets you change jobs whenever you want continues to eradicate play styles in the effort to make all jobs the same.

Because they care more about the choreography. A fight that is 100% random, is not fun. A fight that is 100% predictable, you can have NPC players do everything. In order for the game to be balanced for all jobs, all jobs have to be essentially the same. The NPC players can't be "perfect" at their jobs, positionals, otherwise the human player has nothing to do (and in many cases if you enter the dungeon with NPC players as a healer, you can just do nothing at trash mobs.) I'm sure if you enter as a DPS, you can just nope out of every fight, and it'll just take longer.

A fight has to have some level of random element to it so that bots and players can't just program their macro keyboard to do the fight. So you accomplish this with how the enemies choose targets and lose enmity from the tank. You accomplish this by having the damage range being fairly wide, and GCD variables' being different on all jobs. But they're not different enough. A DPS rotation should not just be "press the highlighted buttons in order", a healer shouldn't just need to hit "party heal" every 3 seconds to keep the party alive.

I don't know how I'd want to see healer's fixed, but I'd want to see it fixed in a way so that they aren't so samey. White Mage is Cure+Regen, So why is Astrologian also that? The original HW version was better in that you could have either regen or shields (And thus easier to decide how work with the other healer in 8-player content.) The jobs should ultimately be capable of putting out the "same level of damage over time" if the highlighted buttons are pressed, but otherwise how oGCD's should be used situationally rather than trying to exhaust all oGCD's immediately. At least tanks and healers have situational reasons to use their oGCD's. DPS however get hyperfocused on some specific rotation meta they found on the internet, and thus the developers have to constantly are required to break the meta's otherwise players will only ever pick and use the DPS that does the most damage. Hence no DPS can be "better" than another.

In contrast to how it would make the most sense. All melee DPS have instant cast's. You'd think that "faster" DPS should have faster recast times with less damage. I'm pretty sure Square-Enix devs just have a calculator of DPS-over-time given a perfect (highlighted) combo and adjusts everything so that the overall damage is the same between all melee DPS, all Ranged DPS, and likewise Tank and Healer's, so that no job is actually "better" when played perfectly.