Here's the Answer to Test on the Healer Strike and future class design Square

[yaba_gabagool]

The only reason I'm posting this is because Square has a bad history of making poor design choices or firing people who are right and then having to back peddle (Shout out to the Chad QA Healer who said the job design for healers was too easy, and rather than promote the guy, in typical JP business fashion they fired him because he went against the current design paradigm and spoke up -- you'll always be remembered in my heart -- even if Yoshi is out of touch on healer design in his classic take on, "do ultimate difficulty content to compensate for our poor job design").

Therefore, I'll try to be concise and then expand later if needed on this expansive subject.

Posit:

Singular role jobs are an outdated, boomer, and inferior way to design around. Locking someone into meatshield, dps bot, or heal bot and having them only function as such is a sacred cow that needs to removed.

This implementation doesn't need to be thrown away completely, but does need to be iterated on.

How do we do this?

Mainly, DPS as a role should no longer exist solely. DPS as a core function needs to be spread out among three different archetypes:

Tanks/Frontline, Healers, Utility/Support.

Why though?

Firstly, this paradigm keeps roles from having too much overlap with each other. You can give tanks a bit of healing, healers a bit of utilty, and utility a bit of either of the other two, but there's limit to the toe stepping you can do if you're intelligent about it.

The idea that DPS must be the balancing factor for your job design is a flawed one. DPS should be balanced around overall content, not competitive metrics to validate job balance against other jobs for content.

By granting portions of DPS to each major "role", it allows for the removal of the singular and often lopsided design issues you run into when creating a theme for a job but need to curtail its ability because it deals "too much/too little" damage for its archetype.

Does this mean DPS is unimportant or we can just throw it at all jobs and expect the game to be balanced? No. However, the balance needs to focus on group compositions versus game content overall rather than the above job contention. Classes should only be singular digits of difference in DPS balance, not the current double digits we see between roles.

This enables Square to push what is capable and focus solely on job design as a function of the main role interacting alongside its dps rotation for a more enriched and interestering play experience.

The above statement has a positive effect on providing player agency and player expression in their job that is focused on a gratifying job fantasy.