HIGH POWER=LOW TIER?

Because Mana/MP/Magic fuel became far too easy to replenish or the Max MP is far too high.

Spells (which are usually a better choice almost all the time) are uber-effective - usually more powerful, and able to hit multiple enemies, and are often the key to exploiting a monster's weakness. Your Tank, while not necessarily a bad character, just can't compete against the fireball-slingin' mage powerhouses with seemingly unlimited ammo.

If you want to see the brutes take center stage, play Dragon Warrior I-IV (and maybe the others, but IV was the last I played). The Soldier and the Fighter and Ragnar and Alena take center stage because they hit hard, their HP and DEF allow them to survive longer, and MP is just too precious to waste. (Alena from DQIV is arguably the best character in the game).

(And Sabin is good - his Blitzes are just like magic).

I think the ultimate example would be the boy from Secret of Mana. He has the most health, power, defense, everything but magic power out of everyone in SoM and he's the absolute worst character. Magic is usually grossly overpowered and far more versatile than the guy with the sword that can maybe exploit a weakness as Kentona already said.

Same thing can be applied to speed in some games. Guys who can get multiple attacks for the slow guy's one, hit more reliably, ect. Especially when it comes as general turns instead of combos, the speed makes the character far more versatile as they can do anything, not just attack.

Then there's games like FF1 where its cool to actually be the guy with the big sword because the big sword actually wrecks shit up faster, all the time, and you can take more hits than that flimsy black mage.

Really, the effectiveness of the heavy hitters varies by game and there really isn't some sweeping generalization that's always correct. The heavy hitter isn't as useful as he used to be since being big and strong isn't as cool nowadays, but there's still plenty of games where big sticks are better than flames of death.


And sometimes some characters just plain suck (Cyan, without the psycho-glitch)

It's an issue of growth rates, too. Dungeons and Dragons is a classic example. For the first five to ten levels, Fighters dominate. They have a huge selection of Feats, dish out plenty of damage and can take a lot of hits. But growth rates really change things up. By the late game, spellcasters outclass fighters by a ton. The basic explanation is that fighter growth rate is arithmetic while spellcaster growth is geometric. A spellcaster can't take more than a single hit in the beginning, but by the endgame, he's challenging gods.

Let's take a look at Sabin specifically here (and Kentona, I'm sorry, but this is where I show why you're wrong about Sabin). Sabin starts out pretty cool. He's got access to some free techniques that deal quite a lot of damage, including some that can hit every enemy. That's pretty sweet. Unfortunately, he has just about the worst equipment selection in the game, and just about nothing he can equip will up his magic stat....which is bad, because all of his techniques are based on his Magic stat, not to mention how utterly dominating Magic is in Final Fantasy 6.

Meanwhile, Relm (who has a nigh-useless special technique and whose stats aren't all that great in the beginning) has the best Magic stat in the game, and access to some freakin' sweet equipment for taking it even higher. A lot of people write off Relm as useless because they try to make tiers apply across the entire game, and in an RPG that's just ridiculous. Sabin is top-tier at....until you get out of the Magitek Factory. He just sinks lower and lower after that. Relm is mid-tier at best when she first joins, but becomes top-tier in no time flat.

There *are* some pretty awesome bruisers out there, though. It's just that most of the ones I can think of are in Tactical games, and only work well because you've got other units to back them up. Which is really what Tanks are *supposed* to do, though--they're supposed to be meat shields. To that end, you've got characters like Mog and Gau, who can easily hit the Defense cap and become almost untouchable in FF6 because of their awesome equipment. Give 'em Phoenix Downs or Life2, and they'll keep your party alive no matter what gets thrown at you.

I think everyone should read this article:
http://www.rpgmaker.net/articles/4/

I think a lot of the problem stems from "tiering" in the first place. There will ALWAYS be a mathematically superior advantage from one person to another; one piece of equipment to another, unless you have a clean-slate stat board that the player can build themselves, and in that case every character is identical. That's the balance: character differentiation on one end of the scale, and tiering on the other.

Think about how you want your battle mechanics to work. You'll notice that one of the basics of FF is that you can customize most players. FF6 was great because each player has unique abilities. Unfortunately, they also have different stat tables and equipment choices, thus you get tiers. At what point do we sacrifice character personality, history, even the game's plot so that your characters can be placed into tiers?

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with pushing out as much as you can from a char. For people like Brick, and it sounds like many of you, that's what makes a game fun, and allows you to challenge yourself by running through the game at lower levels by using skill and strategy. I guess that I'm saying there should optimally be a threshold when a game's players are tiered: if a character is so low that (s)he's considered statistically useless, then that's bad balancing. If a character might not be a first choice in a particular battle, but is good enough to still be used because the player "likes" that character, or has fun skills, then that's good game design, in my opinion. Sabin falls in this category. He has great skills to stemart with, which cost nothing. If the game didn't facilitate the ability to keep on hand a full stock of ethers, and magic consumption actually had to be considered, he'd remain a top-tier character. But for me, he's just plain cool; I always like monk-type characters, and he hit hard. That's what kept him in my party.

I found my solution from WoW. Specialization trees might sound like a blatant rip off of a Blizzard classic system, but I think it's a great solution to allow each of the characters that you enjoyed creating to be useful. What I had envisioned is to have 2 or 3 "sets" of skills that can easily be toggled, like mini class-changes. These would be uniquely divided amongst your characters, for instance some would have tanking skillsets that are meant to defend in different ways (physical defense, elemental defense, and those are just a couple of many examples). When that character is not needed as a tank, they may have a damage-dealing spec that still allows them to be useful. Changing this could be as simple as going into the menu and hitting a button, or more complicated in terms of skill-learning and re-learning systems. The rest is up to the designer to balance these out.