Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Azurarok]

sacred soil/asylum/earthly star became enormous for the giant arenas and hitboxes they started doing in EW high-end content, which made them barely different from a raidwide heal in most other content.
Earthly Star's also made AST worse in field operations/open world maps and Deep Dungeon since those often have things you don't want to pull.

[Voryn]

Worth noting they made a bunch of smaller job changes RIGHT BEFORE releasing Chaotic Raids a short while later, suggesting that the developers thought the changes were "necessary" to possibly make those jobs function properly in Chaotic.

Like, can anyone picture a NIN trying to do the old "don't move, don't even turn" Ten Chi Jin with all of those supposed body checks?

The recent job changes were along with FRU release so I’m still thinking they were likely in consideration of that. Chaotic doesn’t have a scary dps check that requires good balancing for all jobs to be viable, and delaying Ten Chi Jin a little for the sake of doing mechanics is not going to matter that much when you can have many deaths in Chaotic and still clear as long as failed mechanics don’t cause a complete wipe. Meanwhile in a new ultimate everyone needs to be doing as much damage as possible to beat the dps check.

And if any further job changes occur from here on out, does anyone really think it's because people are struggling with said job mechanics in normal content?

There’s definitely changes for the sake of normal content. Like DRK’s buff to Abyssal Drain’s healing, even though that ability isn’t used in raids. But it does seem these changes are less common than those made for the sake of raiding.

It's at a point where they might as well just give people a completely different set of skills/hotbars for this or that PVE content. It's not like they don't have a bunch of unused skill animations and affects lying around. (Sure, you don't need a damaging gap closer on your Dark Knight and Gunbreaker for ABC fight, but what about the XYZ one? And so forth and so on.)

A damaging gap closer isn’t the best example (when have we needed one that does damage?), but they wouldn’t have to do an extreme solution of having so many versions of each job if they could be balanced properly without making all of them simpler. I want my favourite job to be fun in both DSR and UWU. And if people complain “oh no it’s annoying to do [thing] during a raid” then they could pick one of the easier jobs. But I’m not enough of an expert to know how to accomplish this: DSR assumes tanks can handle up to five tankbusters in around 2.5 minutes during its phase 6 but UWU does not ask for this much.

[Buttobi]

It is not too crazy for jobs to be balanced around the highest difficulty content. It becomes a problem when there is a total disregard for how they play in the content outside of that. The balance is lovely, especially compared to other games, but this game leaves a lot to be desired in other areas when it comes to job design.

[Maltothoris]

We still didn't really need th range extension for p10s especially when for bonds 1 was when you could all go on one platform. And on wings 2, just put a regen on the dps who's going to right side if its not a tank or healer that gets the tether.

Edit: Dare I say, the only fight that the range increase was justified was p11s with how huge they made the boss' hitbox was and what the situation was for Dark and Light.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]Dare I say, the only fight that the range increase was justified was p11s with how huge they made the boss' hitbox was and what the situation was for Dark and Light.

If you're speaking of the one where we had tethers & need to be either close or far apart from our partners, I think only SGE would have trouble dealing with that.

WHM can use their Lilybell to negate the healing requirement.
SCH has plenty ways to deal with the mech, & I don't think it should come as a surprise that they're the best healer equipped to deal with "I need to be far away from party"-mechanic healing requirements.
AST can deploy charged horoscope right before the party make their move to their position. It will proc just as the first instance of damage goes off. It's tight, but it's possible. If they need more, they can drift the 20y Earthly Star to catch everybody, too.
SGE has... Zoe+E.Prog I guess? Lmao.

But frankly it shouldn't be a problem either. It should be fine for X healer to be 'worse' vs Y healer in one of the floor, as they can also be 'better' in another floor.

[mallleable]

There will always be a push, and pull between fight design, and job design -- a tension. Balance, and design needs to be treated less like an end goal, and more like a process. I think the issue is that their process is kinda slow, and not as nimble as it could be so these tensions are felt by players for much longer than they should.

[Voryn]

Increasing the range of heals and buffs always seemed to me like part of the goal to make it so each job’s tools always “work” (or at least work more often) and also not require any party coordination to be useful.

In terms of “always working,” you can expect your raidwide mitigation to affect all party members most of the time. Off the top of my head, DRK and GNB are lessening the idea of cooldowns also having other requirements to he used (DRK no longer needs 50 meter for Living Shadow, and GNB no longer needs as many carts to do both Gnashing Fang and Double Down). Ten Chi Jin now can’t accidentally be wasted by moving. The large hitboxes for raid bosses in Endwalker were allegedly to reduce friction, but I’d interpreted that as “let’s make sure tank and melee dps’s rotation always works as expected.” I’d count the new non-random Astrologian design as this type of change as well because they can always have Lord during raid buffs now.

In terms of party coordination there’s Living Dead not required any external healing to cleanse the debuff. And then older changes like Bard and Astro no longer have buffs that affect anyone else’s rotation. Warrior also never needs to ask for an Esuna now. In general, utility within a role is really similar now so you know what you’re getting from your teammates. Like the previous point, each job’s tools “always work” now because you don’t need to care about your team to use them.

I’m not a fan of this direction since it removes some of the satisfaction that can be gained from doing things right, but if this really is the goal then I can understand why. It reduces the skill gap between better and worse players (I don’t agree with this reasoning myself though, there should be better tutorials instead IMO), it probably makes balancing easier in high end content where it really counts, and it helps when most of the time we’re playing this game with random teammates, even sometimes in high end content.

[Azurarok]

making pankardia a thing and adding shielding gimmicks to kardion heals would've worked and be far more unique from the faux fairy it is right now

[Valence]

I'm not accusing you of being a bad player, or for clearing later. If anything having problems with the fight 3 months later with overgear in PF also speaks quite a lot about PF, and since I haven't PFed as much as you seem to have, I can only defer to you as the problems that PF can bring up. This is why I'm saying this isn't a problem of healing and mitigation range, but a problem of DDR and body checks, especially for Bonds 3 into Dividing Wings 2.

The reason you weren't even aware of this Bonds 1 strat is precisely because you did the fight late. This is the whole point of me checking when you did it, which explains your ignorance on the matter.