Its a problem tbh with MMO design where Developers forget to put in ways of pushing niche situations to try and “distract” their players from focusing primarily on damage.
Obviously in a multiple class build-variety game you’re not going to have everything be balanced. Ideally you throw enough varied situations that the playerbase goes “ah fuk it” because their ideal isn’t valid for a significant amount of situations because of monkey wrenches you throw in.
TOS so far even excusing Pvp (cus Idgaf for it, unless it improves), chit in pve is kind of basic and differs little. Im surprised they don’t have a higher tier variation of Swashbuckling given how they wanted lower ranks to fade out of relevancy. We get a lot of different damage skills that replace or coincide with other damage skills, and utility skills don’t get the same treatment nearly as frequently. The game is very focused on player damage output, and that’s going to lead quite frankly to a high appreciation of damage.
That’s part of why some games try to enforce a trinity (to create at least 3 valuable structures), but you can do this in more then the traditional way.
ToS is either going to either have to homogenize a bit more of DPS output, or well give us those niche situations or it’s going to be the same arguments all the time.
“Urr why you care so much about damage” “Kill faster, is better”.