From a player perspective I find it kind of odd honestly.
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From a player perspective I find it kind of odd honestly.
As a FF11 vet, I do not miss sub-jobs in FF14. Plus it would probably be even more of a balance nightmare for the dev team.
I suppose closest we got was the old action system where you had to level a bunch of extra jobs to get skills, back in ARR.
No. No I do not.
I doubt this would happen. Let's take Arcanist for example. Arcanist has two jobs: Summoner and Scholar. They share some skills and they all level together. Arcanist is the only one that has two jobs. There's a reason for that. The fact that Yoshi-P and crew have not given secondary jobs to other classes should tell you something about how they feel about OP's proposal.
WoW specializations (which is basically what OP is suggesting) was really fun and cool because it allowed some classes to occupy multiple roles and it means everyone could be a DPS. If you wanted to be a paladin DPS, you could, and that's awesome. It means paladin wasn't exclusive which means you could still play paladin and have the paladin flavor and fantasy even if you hate tanking (hi, that's me.)
But they're a balance disaster. Personally I would like to see something like flavors that don't change the job at all mechanically, only aesthetically. I.e: A gunslinger flavor for Machinist. Still machinist, same potencies, same rotation, just changed aesthetically away from the tools and mech flavor to maybe being a dual gun user.
I think one of the issues is that players will always figure out which job is better. Which isn’t a problem if you look at it ‘in a vacuum’, you just pick what you think looks coolest or fits your idea best of what your character should be like. But that’s usually not how it plays out in an mmo where playing the ‘gimped’ version will often net you criticism or exclusion as a consequence for your choices from others. Besides that it just creates more balancing for devs, to prevent players from falling in the trap described above, which usually will lead to homogenisation of classes over time.
From an rpg pov these kind of things are very cool but from a practical pov you can see game devs in mmo’s have actively steered away from it over time.
No, because that would mean jobs using same class would suffer from having to share the class abilities.
A DPS based on PLD would have the Fight or flight buff, shield bash, Spirit Within.
A job based on BLM class would have the whole fire, ice and thunder attack as well as scathe.
SMN has physick and even after 6 years it's still useless.
If you think "But you have to update those through traits or just remove them like SCH doesn't have access to all ACN abilities!" then what's the point of classes?
Personally I would have liked if more classes branched out like Arcanist does into Scholar and Summoner. Then you could have had Marauder branching into Warrior (Tank) or Berserker (DPS), Gladiator into Paladin (Tank) or Rune/Mystic Knight (DPS), Thaumaturge into Black Mage (DPS) or Geomancer (Healer), etc.
But alas, the time is past.