With riding Chobos hastily on the horizon I've come up with an idea for a possible gathering/crafting class and job involving our favorite fluffy yellow friends:
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I apologise for the very long posts I've made in this thread, but in order to truly explain the scope of the ideas I'd come up with I needed to add a lot of explaination to them so people could get an idea of what it would look like and how it would operate.
Chocobo Breeder
A chocobo breeder would be a special 'crafting' class that operates more on a real-time basis. They would specialise in the raising and training of different kinds of chocobo to suit their needs, or the needs of a friend from their linkshell, or to sell the chocobo at the market wards or upcoming auction house to someone who wants a certain kind of chocobo.
Chocobos could be raised in a variety of different ways. the crafter could concentrate on increasing the chocobos speed and stamina, making it a specialised riding chocobo, or work on it's ability to fight, which in turn could be used as a pet for future pet-based battle classes and jobs.
Each chocobo breeder would be given stables, these would operate in an instance seperate from the gaming world as having enough stables for each player all in one or three cities would be impossible. Inside the stables would be an incubator for hatching any chocobo eggs you manage to aquire, a feeding machine to put in chocobo food such as gysahl greens and the stables themselves which each chocobo would stand in.
When interacting with a chocobo in the stables you'd be given multiple options. One would simply be to interact with it in a friendly way such as patting it on the head or perhaps combing it's feathers. Another would be to transport you and that particular chocobo to a specific training ground. These training grounds would also be instanced so as not to clog up certain areas of the world.
Different training grounds could include a racetrack, which you could use to ride your chocobo around, or let it run around itself, to increase certain stats such as speed, vitality or endurance. This would in turn make the chocobo faster at running and allow it to sprint for longer periods of time, as well as increase it's health pool, making it very good as a riding chocobo.
Another traiing ground could be for mock battles. The chocobo would proceed in attacking training dummies or weak monsters to increase it's strength, defence and dexterity, making it more specialised as a fighting chocobo, which could then be used as a pet for any kind of 'beast master' class/job the game may add.
However as certain stats increase, other stats may decrease, so it would be impossible to make a chocobo that is both excellent at riding and excellent at fighting, as that would cause players to only ever want to purchase those kinds of chocobos and make it more difficult for people just starting in chocobo breeding from making a sale.
Your classes XP would be earned for pretty much anything you do during your time in the chocobo stables and it's training grounds, and as your level in the class increases, so does the stat gain for your chocobos as you train them, allowing you to train new chocobos faster.
Also as your level increases you'd be able to breed special kinds of chocobo, such as one of varying colour, size, shape or appearance, perhaps even eventually allowing a special skill when reaching a certain level that could be used at the incubator when inserting an egg that let's you customise the chocobos appearance for when it hatches, allowing your chocobo to be more personalised.
You could also summon one of your retainers into the chocobo stable so that they could look after them whilst you're out in the world doing leve's, dungeons, gathering or whatever it is you want to do. This way you wouldn't be forced to log on every day just to make sure your chocobos are ok.
Another little thing that could be added is that chocobos could become ill, at this point when you interact with the chocobo you'd be given the option to attempt to cure it of it's illness.
This would initialise what we all currently know as the 'crafting system' but instead of standard synthesis, rapid synthesis and carefull synthesis we'd get something like 'standard dosage, heavy dosage and light dosage' as you give your chocobo medicine. Each time you make an attempt the progress bar would fill a certain percentage dependant on how successfull you were, and instead of durability you would have 'health'. If the health numbers drop to 0 before progress reaches 100% your chocobo remains ill, and you would have to use more medicine to try and cure it, if you hit 100% the chocobo is cured of it's illness, also giving the possibility that it may gain a small amount of a certain stat as a reward if the quality of doctoring is high, much like creating a high quality synthesis.
Another addition would be the ability for other crafts such as armourer, blacksmith, leatherworker and weaver to create armour, harnesses and other usefull items for your chocobo, each giving certain stats to compliment what the chocobo already has. For instance armour would obviously increase it's defence for use in fighting, as well as strength to increase the damage of it's attacks. A harness would give it bonus stats in speed or endurance, making it better at riding. Or you could just dress it up in funny/awesome/cute clothes to make it look good. Perhaps blacksmith could make a beak-guard, a metal shield to cover the chocobos beak with maybe small spikes or things attached which would essentially be used as the chocobos weapon when battling monsters, also increasing it's attack power.
To go with this, harvesting, botany and perhaps fishing would need to have chocobo food included into it's list of possible gathered materials, such as different types of greens. Culinary could then maybe turn those into a specialised chocobo meal that could have certain special traits to them, like increasing the chocobos happiness or drastically decreasing it's level of hunger.
This would also mean chocobos could be given special personality traits, such as obediant, rebellious, carefree etc. that would make it act differently. A rebellious battle chocobo may ignore the players commands when told to attack or use a battle skill, a carefree could perhaps wander off for a little bit whilst it's following you around, and obviously an obediant one would be your faithfull pet, doing everything you say.
Personality traits would be decided by what food you feed a chocobo whilst raising it, as well as how much attention you give it or how well you look after it. If it becomes ill and you ignore it for too long it would become rebellious, likewise if you fawned over it too much it would become carefree.
Another instanced area the chocobo stables could include would be a small farming area, like a greenhouse, where you would be able to grow specific chocobo food for your chocobos, so you aren't forced to go out and find harvesting spots in the hope of getting food. At the same time this could be considered a food storage area so that when you leave your stable on automated with the retainer, that's an ample supply of food for the retainer to feed them should you be away from the game for certain periods of time.
Also including a 'holiday' mode would probably help many players, as if you were on holiday and unable to attend to your chocobos there'd be nothing that could be done about it. In that case you'd set your stable on holiday mode before you leave, which would but your stable into a suspended state. The chocobos inside wouldn't age or become ill, nor use up food, and you can de-activate holiday mode when you come back to the game.
You would also gain a chocobo stable NPC linkpearl when becoming a chocobo breeder, this would be used in conjunction with your retainer so that when you click on it (the same way as you use other linkpearls) your retainer would give you information regarding the current state of your chocobos, such as "Everything is fine" or "[insert chocobo name] has become ill", "We're running low on [insert food]" and other such things, which wil allow you to know if you need to spend time at your stables without having to go to a city and look for yourself.
Also you'd be able to invite friends, linkshell members or possible purchasers into your stable simply by them following you into the transition area whilst in a party with you, so they could look at your chocobos first-hand and see what stats they have or which one they'd be interesting in having/buying.
As your level increases also you could perhaps purchase bigger stables or better equipment to better care for, raise and train your chocobos. Items in the stables could perhaps be given ranks like other classes that may lose durability when used and require repair from the relevant crafting class that makes them, as well as reducing the stats they give to the breeder if it is not of a relevant rank (E.G/ Level 30 Feeding Trough with +10 reduction to hunger, being used by a Level 10 Breeder, would not give the full +10 reduction) this allows for a multitude of different chocobo items of varying levels and appearances, so that you feel you are progressing as a breeder each time you upgrade your stables equipment, as well as your own DoH/DoL clothing.
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That is all I'm able to think up of so far, post your opinions, comments and ideas
Also check out my idea for a future battle class:
Reaper Battle Class/Job