We did it! Amazing DRK changes!

[Carighan]

I'd rather have jobs be differentiated by their gameplay than some weird checklist of "strengths and weaknesses".

I think you misunderstand. One necessitates the other.

Any non-trivial difference in gameplay will by its very nature make the job better against some things and worse against others. At that point, design might as well lean into it, focusing the actual tooltip effects even more into the niche and augmenting both the strengths and the weaknesses, "enhance job feel", basically.

Gameplay has to be different, yes. We don't want the current copy/paste job that basically describes every single role but the two ranged ones (and even those are crumbling). But this also assumes everyone is okay with genuinely being weaker in many situations - and stronger in others. But this also means we have to at some point accept that the devs will get blasted with a ton of comments about imbalance and people switching, e.g., to all Black Mage for one fight then all Reaper for the next etc etc, and having to work with that as people are annoying needing to have every job levelled. But at the same time, meaningful gameplay difference without situational imbalance is impossible, far as any MMORPG that tried so far can tell, and it's a lot of years, we can probably just assume this is a universal truth at this point.

[Terhix]

Any non-trivial difference in gameplay will by its very nature make the job better against some things and worse against others.

Yet XIV somehow achieves the worst of both worlds where the gameplay, once you exclude the dps rotation, is near identical and the balance of the tank kits is still off. They could have turned Shake it Off, Divine Veil, Dark Missionary, and Heart of Light into a role action button that does universal 10% mit + some hot, and this is the complete list of how the gameplay for all tanks would change:

[Carighan]

Yet XIV somehow achieves the worst of both worlds where the gameplay, once you exclude the dps rotation, is near identical and the balance of the tank kits is still off. They could have turned Shake it Off, Divine Veil, Dark Missionary, and Heart of Light into a role action button that does universal 10% mit + some hot, and this is the complete list of how the gameplay for all tanks would change:

Actually not at all true, we're just "spoiled". Our "big imbalances" are yestergame's "we're done balancing, stuff is less than 25% off from each other, call it a day"-solution.

It really is that different nowadays. BLMs explode at Pictos doing 4% more damage while being easier to play, back in the days (/grandpamode on) you'd be delighted if your favorite class dealt 50% of the damage of whatever was the overpowered meta, and the killspeed would vary massive based on whether you got 40 random people vs 8 parties all hyper-optimizing.

That is not to devalue our own balance struggles at all, though. Rather, our current balance struggles exist on a platform on which everyone can do anything, and we're worried about someone doing it better or worse. Previous MMOs often intentionally did not create content to say, have a tank of class X or Y. It was only tank Z that was ever created to tank this, bring a tank of class Z if you want to do it. The context changed wildly in the past ~20 years.

[Arohk]

It really is that different nowadays. BLMs explode at Pictos doing 4% more damage while being easier to play, back in the days (/grandpamode on) you'd be delighted if your favorite class dealt 50% of the damage of whatever was the overpowered meta, and the killspeed would vary massive based on whether you got 40 random people vs 8 parties all hyper-optimizing.

That is not to devalue our own balance struggles at all, though. Rather, our current balance struggles exist on a platform on which everyone can do anything, and we're worried about someone doing it better or worse. Previous MMOs often intentionally did not create content to say, have a tank of class X or Y. It was only tank Z that was ever created to tank this, bring a tank of class Z if you want to do it. The context changed wildly in the past ~20 years.

i don't know if that was better or worse, the only game where that ever "worked" was vanilla World of Warcraft, you really had the feeling of class identity, every class had its own strenghts and weaknesses but balance were thrown out the window.

[Terhix]

Actually not at all true, we're just "spoiled". Our "big imbalances" are yestergame's "we're done balancing, stuff is less than 25% off from each other, call it a day"-solution.

It really is that different nowadays. BLMs explode at Pictos doing 4% more damage while being easier to play, back in the days (/grandpamode on) you'd be delighted if your favorite class dealt 50% of the damage of whatever was the overpowered meta, and the killspeed would vary massive based on whether you got 40 random people vs 8 parties all hyper-optimizing.

I'm explicitly not talking about DPS but okay.