Originally Posted by
Kalamia
I definitely have mixed feelings about this. One of the main things I enjoyed about the point allotment system was that if you started a new job at level one, you were not completely useless. Because of your training in other classes, you were stronger or smarter or whatever, and so your rank one class could survive fighting a level four or five enemy with a bit of difficulty (just try walking out of the gate as your new level 1 advanced job in FFXI and trying to fight one of the lowest level orcs, you die in maybe two hits).
However, because a good amount of us, myself included, try out a variety of classes--at the very least most of us have tried one disciple of war and one disciple of magic--the most logical choice is to balance your character so that all stats are roughly the same. This meaning that with the exception of say, those who hate playing mages and so never point any points into intelligence and peity, you will never be great at anything, you will just be good at everything. Although I do believe that the guild mark traits such as "Will to Power" (that let you trade some points you assigned to intelligence into strength) did a fairly good job at balancing that. Though that did have the problem that you had to be fairly good at one type of job before being better at the other (my highish-level conjurer spent alot of marks to be a better disciple of war, but none of my disciples of war are high enough to do the opposite). Maybe flip-flop which ones you get--i.e. the mages can spend points to turn strength into intelligence?