Quote Originally Posted by Terhix View Post
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.