Can anyone clearly explain "job homogenization" in this game?

[HikariKurosawa]

Ah, ad hominem.

Of course, it becomes a bit silly when you yourself are the only one who has failed to play on a high level.

You do realize in this game we can see which your character is from your forum profile and it's easy enough to find out since it's public what you have done/havenotdone? As in, we can see you have not even finished normal raids, nevermind savages or anything higher than that? This is all public information. Maybe next time check how easy/difficult it is to figure out how much of a liar you are, first.

I never said I was a high level player, but I'm not the one claiming the game is easy. I'm more accomplished than you at the very least.

Remember this quote

You accused people of not knowing what homogenisation is at all. This isn’t about a “homogenisation problem” this was you opening with the belief that people didn’t know what homogenisation was then when people explained it to you you pivoted to the belief that homogenisation in the pursuit of balance isn’t actually homogenisation

Sure, I wouldn't really say that 2 minute meta is homogenization though. Like I said, standardization is a different concept. The homogenization in this game is ranged physical raidwide defensives, and a few other non-problematic unimpactful things.

[ArtaVallian]

Yeah I agree, they have room and it is possible to create much more different tanks and jobs in general. I just don't really see the issue with the minor level of "homogenization" that exists, and would argue it is necessary for the current abilities of the jobs that exist in order for them to be viable. It's such a low level of shared function that I can't really see it as homogenization. The core gameplay of every single job is wildly different in this game.

No, the core gameplay is not that different, especially not compared to how it used to be in StB and even in early ShB. I just discovered that they removed DRG's mechanic where they maintained a meter by quickly completing combos. The meter was the countdown for a damage buff window. The better you were at keeping up your combos, the longer it would last. That's gone, now. That was the only thing besides the jumps that made it stand out, and it really added to the fun. But because they want to stick to their models of uptime and downtime and such with savage they gutted that, and it feels not much different from how I remember SAM.

Also, for SMN, I liked how they got rid of some jank parts of it, but I'm now very tired of not being able to double or triple-weave for most of it. My dots were removed, and it was oh, well, but they didn't give me anything else for it. My pets don't even passively damage, anymore, even though they easily could with ranged moves. But really, SMN feels like a hollow version of itself. You can choose the order of your moves, but you have to use all of them... except maybe Ifrit's, which might not be worth the damage with their long cast time. The gauge is pretty much useless because it's not building to anything, it's only good for using two resources that have little impact. I want my 3 resources back. I want my pets back. I want my triple-weaving back. We're just a worse RDM right now with the order of hard and fast casts shifted around a bit.

And SCH pretty much feels like SGE. It can either have a shield effect or have a pure healing effect on many of its moves. It only has a 1 button rotation like all the other healers. It has one dot, just like SGE. It used to be plague king, like SMN, applying and spreading dots. If they even just gave back the dot spreading to SCH and let it deal more damage with a move depending on the number of dots on an enemy like how SMN used to do, it would feel so much better again. But nope, they don't want healers damaging. They don't want healers to be fun, clearly, from the 1 dot rotations. Don't have fun, just heal.

Those are just some examples.

[Carighan]

Yeah for Summoner and Scholar I mostly miss the actual pet being, well, a pet. Pet jobs are supposed to have powerful pets in return for a combination of a) having to babysit the pet through AoE damage and movement and b) being shackled to the server AI and a command queue.

In ideal situations they outperform other jobs in raw power (say you got to move but your pet can stand still and keep attacking) but in bad situations they drop in power from the large portion of their damage/healing that is the pet falling away, having died to an AoE or being in the wrong spot and not easy to get where you need it.

[Raidoser]

Sure, I wouldn't really say that 2 minute meta is homogenization though. Like I said, standardization is a different concept. The homogenization in this game is ranged physical raidwide defensives, and a few other non-problematic unimpactful things.

I feel like standardization is used when speaking of value (example : price,quality or DPS), homogenization is used for "feelings" (example does it play the same, does it look the same).

The 2mn meta only impact hard fights otherwise you don't truly need to care for it, it exist for the parsing community which are the people loving to do harder fights but it still brough a form of homogenization in that community because everything revolve around not having your GCD/secondary ressource drifting away from the 2mn burst to maximize it, limiting the use of spell speed/skill speed for some jobs, min-maxer literally have their rotation timing anticipated over that 2mn period again to optimize that 2mn burst and because of harder fight balance requiring every one to pump maximum DPS or hit enrage.

You have yourself admitted being annoyed by bunshin and his 90sec CD which doesn't fit in that meta and ninja CD timing (i'm the same opinion as you) and it's because you would prefer to have it align with trick attack and every 2mn CD/buff because it would certainly flow better with the rest of the job and meta which mean homogenization impact you more than you think because again you said it's a reason you avoid using Nin.

Homogenization is a good thing for base toolkit of each roles (a healer without esuna would be annoying) but it shouldn't stop class fantasy to exist and Nin is again a good example : to me what made Nin different from the rest of other melees was his hybrid spell caster/melee nature allowing it to still continue to DPS at range + shukuchi (after the two buffs to movement skills) allowing it to play with that fantasy of getting in/out of melee range while maintaining pressure on the enemies.
That's why i don't truly understand :
- How Trick attack still hasn't be made a ranged attack (the new aoe is cool but ranged would be cooler)
- Why Bhavacakra hasn't been deleted and baked into Hellfrog (because it's a cooler animation and a ranged attack)
- Why Raiju isn't simply a ranged attack which activate shukuchi passive allowing to delete the "forked" version of Raiju for exactly the same effect.
To me it's because the devs are afraid of possible balancing issue that could happen from deviating from their homogenization style, why ? i don't know but in the end homogenization impact the game way more than it should.

[Moqi]

Homogenization is a good thing for base toolkit of each roles (a healer without esuna would be annoying)

This is what role actions should cover.

I feel like the 2min meta really destroyed job identity because everything has to fit that now. You can't have unique timing to your gameplay loop, or anything that doesn't build towards a burst every 2 min, really. That's why we don't have interesting buffs anymore, no stances, less RNG, no more unique abilities... can't risk using something outside of the burst or not benefitting everybody. That and the pursuit of absolute parity for every job means no more interesting support options, no more niches... lvl 100 skills for shield healers are regens and regen healers get shields. Ridiculous.

[Carighan]

It's evident from how equivalent you can set up the hotbars of most healer, tank and melee jobs. Sure the individual actions differ, but you always have stuff like "Every 60s I double weave these two buttons", "X, Y and Z buttons are my after-a-big-raid hit oGCDs", "A is my short-CD oGCD damage weave, next to it is the AoE one", and so on. And it's staggering just how much of each job has direct equivalents in most~all other jobs of its type. Which makes sense, as you say, the 120s meta confines design and since that is quite restrictive, the design space for jobs is severly limited. Coupled with the large job-pool of FFXIV, you naturally run into constant copy&paste situations.

[Moqi]

I came back after months and unlocked Sage and Reaper. I have my crossbars set up so that similar actions use the same buttons so after reading the tooltips and organizing my bars, I jumped into a dungeon and it was like I had been playing them for forever (funny enough, reaper is so "streamlined" that the setup is more similar to a tank than a melee DPS).

Coupled with the large job-pool of FFXIV, you naturally run into constant copy&paste situations.

The funny thing is that as they expand the job pool, there should be less fear of encountering suboptimal combinations. Having a card buffing only magic attacks was bad when the only magic users were BLM and SMN, but now that all attacks scale off your main stats, we have more magic jobs and more "mixed" jobs (like RPR, DKN, PLD) the chances of having "wasted" buffs/abilities is lower, and yet they push for everything being the same.

[Carighan]

The funny thing is that as they expand the job pool, there should be less fear of encountering suboptimal combinations. Having a card buffing only magic attacks was bad when the only magic users were BLM and SMN, but now that all attacks scale off your main stats, we have more magic jobs and more "mixed" jobs (like RPR, DKN, PLD) the chances of having "wasted" buffs/abilities is lower, and yet they push for everything being the same.

And I mean, even if they could not balanced embraced diversification and ended up with some jobs being flat out better than others (cough, Pictomancer, cough), then that is also... okay? It's trivial to switch jobs, and with so many jobs you'd have to be very new to multiplayer games to expect even a semblance of balance between them without most feeling, well, largely similar to each other. Exactly the problem we're facing now.

I'd rather have a few be our own personal "Difficulty++"-selector for raids and sure I prefer going Viper for dungeons but in raids I'll play Dragoon (or whatever) but in turn my jobs are truly unique with their own strengths, weaknesses and mechanics and gameplay.