Quote Originally Posted by Zolvolt View Post
Job identity is very difficult to balance well with small raid sizes of 8 people. Theres a reason world of warcraft killed 10 player raiding and went with 20 player exclusively. It opens up their raid design to a point where they can reasonably assume every raid team will have 1 or 2 of each class to handle certain problems a specific way. In FFXIV you can't do that. Every tank team, every healer team, and every dps comp (of 1 melee, 1 caster, 1 phys ranged and 1 any) would have to be able to handle anything that happens. This game's raid-scene is not friendly to jobs that are unique or do unique things. FF11 is such a good example of job identity because theres so much room for jobs to do unique but helpful things that are completely different from other jobs and so much room for jobs to play as either a tank or a dps and play so differently in doing so. FF14 can't be like that. It's knows exactly what kind of game it is and has been since implementation when it started off as raid comps being 1 pld, 1 war, 1 whm, 1 sch, 1 bard, 1 monk/dragoon 1blackmage/summoner and 1 any.

We've just added more jobs and had to struggle to fit in every job into that formula. This game will never truely have unique job identities because of that. I'd also like to submit that the holy trinity in it self makes job identity difficult to have implemented well. The lack of a support role in mmo's always leads to homogenization.

Anyways, as exciting as job identity is I can't help but see the forest for the trees. 8.0 is going to have some jobs be very poorly balanced to the point that people will not bring them. Y'all think p8s balance was bad on week1? that was nothing compared to a world where job identity is the core goal of job balance.
Jobs dont really have to do unique things, just have unique gameplay. Warrior and dark knight do not both need to have a fel cleave spam ability, for example
All the tanks having gap closers is fine. all the tanks having fell cleave is not