Quote Originally Posted by gigi_frana View Post
Oh excuse me, are you by any chance the game designer ?
Oh excuse me, are you by any chance even remotely cognizant of what the concept of a "choice" actually is? Classes exist to present a choice to the players. There are multiple class/jobs within each role in order to present multiple options to players wanting to fulfill that role. This is an explicit design construct. WAR and PLD are both tanks.

There is not a choice, however, if a single option within that role is explicitly better than the other options. That is an illusion of choice because you don't really have one. If you want to be effective, you make the only choice that you have. The other choice exists only to make it seem like you really do have a choice.

It's because of this that classes within the same role need to be able to perform the core functionality of that role within a *very* close proximity to one another. What would be the point to playing a SCH if a WHM was universally better? What reason would there be to play a BLM if SUM could easily blow it out of the water? The choice is essentially made for you by the developers: healers would be WHM and casters would be SUM. Any other choice is explicitly sub-optimal and, as such, it's not a choice. Yes, some people will still choose the other roles, but they're making that choice because they value things like playstyle more than they value effectiveness. Anyone that *didn't* value the specific non-balance attributes of the class high enough to have them overcome the disparity in effectiveness would choose to go with SUM rather than BLM.

Unless the classes are *balanced*, there's no real point in having multiple classes for the same role: without balance you just have the tank class, the caster class, the heal class, the mDPS class, and 5 other classes that don't really serve any purpose other than to occupy other people's time. This is why every single MMO constantly strives to ensure that the classes remain balanced. Those that don't end up shooting themselves in the foot and dying soon after. Once players realize that what they thought was an actual choice is simply an illusion, they tend to get upset and leave, if only because they're pissed that the investment that they made in the character by leveling it up ended up being wasted because they weren't privy to the secret class intent of the developers.

Differences in playstyle are good, but differences in effectiveness are *not*. As such, the difference between a WAR and PLD shouldn't be that PLDs are outright better tanks. The difference should be that they're both equally effective tanks that accomplish their comparatively equal level of performance using different playstyles: WAR focuses on self-healing and active mitigation mechanisms whereas PLD focuses on passive mitigation. That's just dandy. When WAR focuses on self-healing and active mitigation but ends up performing explicitly worse than a PLD even if played absolutely flawlessly, someone done fucked up.