That's pretty meaningless other than he shares that opinion.
An appeal to authority is only inappropriate if the authority is not relevant.
The man who led the design team is a relevant authority, for exactly the same reason that (say) one would expect Lin-Manuel Miranda's opinion on the weak points of
Hamilton to be relevant.
But that's the entire point. It's not supposed to be for people who want to do a lot of different things. That's its function. If you want to do a lot of stuff, don't be a Champion.
The only problems here are that 1) 4e failed miserably at balance. Some classes that were better than other classes at damage, control, etc., and 2) you're wrong. For two classes to be balanced, they have to be identical.
I'm sorry,
what???
Who on EARTH said that two things have to be identical to be balance? And who on earth ever said 4e "failed miserably at balance"? Even its most ardent detractors, the people willing to completely invent random crap about it, recognized 4e's balance. I am
completely baffled by these assertions. I emphatically, absolutely reject the idea that "balance"
means being identical. People tout StarCraft, for example, as an excellent demonstration of "asymmetrical balance."
Rock paper scissors is partially asymmetrical ("x wins against y" is a non-transitive relation on the set of moves, but each player engages in the same gameplay loop), yet (by definition) perfectly balanced. No two moves are identical, yet each is perfectly balanced with every other, such that the only way to gain an advantage is to exploit player psychology and long-run behavior, because the rules themselves (again, by definition) prevent any such exploitation.
Once you give one class a different ability, it becomes better at some things and worse than others. The more different abilities you give the classes, the more those things shift and you will not end up with two classes that are equal. There will always be imbalance. The only thing that remains after that is how much imbalance is acceptable. 4e and 5e did pretty well keeping the imbalance in acceptable ranges.
Ooooooor...you could just use the actual, accepted definition of "balance," which is that "balance"
includes the idea of acceptable ranges, because we're talking about statistics, rather than about precise equalities and perfect, diamond rules. And, as I said, I've
run those numbers on things like the Champion, and they are
not acceptable for it, for something specifically geared for doing damage and almost nothing else. The Champion does not even get up to 80% of the Battlemaster's damage output until you've had
at least five reasonably-sized fights a day, and it takes 7-8 to actually be in the same ballpark. This is why it--in some restricted sense--is "bad." It has a clear purpose, dealing damage, and it is demonstrably bad at achieving that purpose relative to equivalent options (other Fighter subclasses)
unless the 6-8 (combat!) encounters per day assumption is met. Since that assumption is generally
not true of 5e games, this means players who want a low-engagement Fighter subclass are--statistically but consistently--shortchanged in a codifiable way compared to those who are comfortable with other Fighter subclasses.
As with any statistical thing, you have to set what reasonable bounds are. Fortunately, we have ready-made examples thereof, like the traditional alpha value (0.05, a 5% chance of committing a false-negative error) and standard deviations/z-scores, so these are not absolutely-arbitrary, "we invented a number that sounded nice" things, but rather ones with over a century (in some areas, pushing two centuries) of established use.
And yet if you google FFXIV classes, you will find some that are better at DPS than others. Some that are more versatile than others. And so on. They are not balanced, but like 3e and 4e, within the acceptable amount of imbalance.
Again: no, they absolutely are balanced, and people
speak of them that way. People
specifically call it "balanced." They do not call it "acceptably imbalanced." "Balance" is, was, and always will be a statistical concept in the gaming sphere, be it video games or tabletop games. People
explicitly make comparisons between FFXIV and WoW, where there have been times where the developers simply straight-up tell players, "Play some other specialization of your class for the next three months, because this one is just not going to work," and where people have defended the ongoing
major divergence between different classes with "balance is too hard to achieve, they couldn't possibly do better."
Honestly, I am so completely baffled by this perspective.
No one uses "balance" to mean "absolutely identical things compared." It's not even what the ordinary
non-game meaning of the word is! You can have three forces, none of which is equal in magnitude or direction to any of the others, but which together result in a balanced configuration.
