Job Individuality/Pride/Dedication

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Originally Posted by Alerith

Ehhhh, yes and no.

For the longest time, WAR was the one and only tank you would ever tank into Aurum Vale. Then some rogues decided to try Paladin tanks. This wasn't well received by the community at large, but as time went on, and people saw that it could actually work pretty damn good, it started to pan out better.

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I would say this is more so likely due to the desperation of being unable to find a tank. Someone probably grabbed a paladin because they couldn't find a warrior and said "lol why were we looking for a warrior, this works fine."

Besides that, yeah it's bound to happen, but the system still highly discourages it.

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Originally Posted by Alerith

Do what I do. Specialize. I've played PLD since the good ol' XI days. I continued to play Gladiator when XIV first came out and jumped into PLD when it first arrived in Eorzea. Even when it was "useless" I continued to play it because I wanted to and was good at it.

Sure, you may have a harder time in the game because min/maxers will try tell you what you can and cannot do, but my philosophy is this:

I play this game for my own enjoyment, not the enjoyment of every other person on the server. I choose to spend my time on Paladin, helping people, rather than grinding away.

I don't expect relic, I don't expect world firsts, I don't expect dibs on drops.

But I'll be damned if I'm not gonna have fun on the job of my choosing.

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I do specialize. I only played WHM, and now I'm only going to play SMN - but I don't want to suffer for it, and it's very possible that I will due to the current system. Posts/topics like my OP is dedicated to feedback for SE, hopefully adjusting their future development mindset to sway positively... but I'm also very interested in the community's opinion.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

I would say this is more so likely due to the desperation of being unable to find a tank. Someone probably grabbed a paladin because they couldn't find a warrior and said "lol why were we looking for a warrior, this works fine."

Besides that, yeah it's bound to happen, but the system still highly discourages it.

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Now you're just assuming things. Despite what you may think, people out there do like trying different strategies. Sometimes a given strategy just doesn't work for a group so they have to tweak it to suit their own group. When I started doing dungeon speed runs with a group we changed the setup for each dungeon at least 5 times before we found one that worked best for us. Wasn't the decided on most optimal strategy but it worked for us. I'm sure we weren't the only ones.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

I meant optimal and beneficial in terms of the difficulty of finding the people. It is easy to get the job you NEED because anyone can just class switch. This is a good thing, but it also means that non-optimal builds are never considered/tested/utilized, and if a certain class doesn't fit the "optimal setup" of the content they may never see the content (unless they switch classes, but they shouldn't have to).

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People will always go for the person who is better-suited for an event. This is true with anything. This is where you take matters into your own hands and do content your way. Do you want to do everything with one job? Sure. Good luck finding people who agree, because again, it's a problem with the community. Not the dev team. The dev team is simply giving you the option to do so, and building content so that switching jobs doesn't make the content a walk in the park.

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Originally Posted by Ruisu

People will always go for the person who is better-suited for an event. This is true with anything. This is where you take matters into your own hands and do content your way. Do you want to do everything with one job? Sure. Good luck finding people who agree, because again, it's a problem with the community. Not the dev team. The dev team is simply giving you the option to do so, and building content so that switching jobs doesn't make the content a walk in the park.

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They will go for the person who is better-suited provided it is reasonable to do so. If the damage difference between monk and dragoon isn't that big, they're not gonna bother going for dragoon... just get one or the other. However, if it's VERY EASY to get a dragoon instead of a monk (which is the case with this class switching system) then by all means they're just gonna turn down the monk and wait for the dragoon.

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Now you're just assuming things.

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It was just a likely example, not an assumption (hence why I put that final statement).

Idk, I really like it. Then again, I love all the jobs that I have leveled (otherwise I wouldn't have bothered). It also means you're not always stuck playing the same thing for 1 event. I don't understand why people limit themselves, to be honest. In FFXI I was only-mage, and I realize my mistake now. Melees are pretty damn fun, and it's not too hard to have all your jobs decently geared (be that mage or melee). Before final save I decided to fix my inventory, and managed to carry all my DoW/M/L/H gear, and still am at 97 inventory slots taken, so it's also not a matter of inventory overload.

I understand though, the point OP is trying to convey, I just don't think it's such a problem with the game, but with the community.

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Originally Posted by EnkiOro

I understand though, the point OP is trying to convey, I just don't think it's such a problem with the game, but with the community.

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It IS a problem with the community, but the community forms these ideas and tendencies due to the way the system is designed.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

It IS a problem with the community, but the community forms these ideas and tendencies due to the way the system is designed.

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Granted it's not the same, but in FFXI you also had to change jobs if for a certain event, someone had to leave, or at Dynamis Lord. This just makes it easier and less troublesome and also cuts downtime by a lot. I've had people that want to lock themselves in one job (say WHM) and yet they show up at events and their gear needs a lot of working around. Then they get upset when you ask them to switch to BLM, for something like AV.

It's just a matter of who do you play with. In a pick-up of course people won't be trusting, because their goal is in the hands of strangers, and I understand if they want to add as little variables to the event as possible. But if you're playing with a group of friends, there shouldn't be many issues, if any at all. Not every strategy works for every group and people shouldn't be scared to play around with the content, and figure it out by themselves.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

Yup, follow the guide that pertains to the content or else it's impossible. It's disappointing.

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An attitude born out of MMOs where the price of 'failure' is huge, eg. camp an HNM for 3 days, get claim, then wipe due to non-maximal job combination. Add to that the 'phat lewt' that so mnay are fixated on which is only obtainable from such fights and you breed a playerbase almost entirely risk-averse.

Thus, players don't want to take risks that 3 days will be wasted so they demand 'efficiency' and min/maxed group setup.

Sure, many are lazy, and want a 'guaranteed' win (if such an option exists with an encounter), but many also I would argue simply want to avoid frustration that non-optimal groups can often bring. It doesn't help when SE and other MMO developers create fights with 'gimmicks' that more or less REQUIRE specific jobs be present or else a 'win' is largely out of reach: eg. Nyzul at upper floors where some job combinations make it EZMODE and others almost a guaranteed fail.

Or COP 'back in the day' when RNG and later SMNs were 'required'. YES, I KNOW, even on release a 'balanced group COULD do the Prommies, but frankly, no one in their right mind deliberately handicapped themselves by NOT taking the 'optimal' job setup: again, the price of failure was so high players didn't intend to take chances.

This is what you get when players demand 'challenging' content which they say with the un-said 'agenda' of making it exclusive and not for the 'casuals', those lesser-skilled players will try to maximise their chances of a 'win' by following the 'one true' way written up in a mix/maxer's 'guide'.

Seems to me, in MMOs it's only the real 'leading edge' shells/guilds/kins that experiment to see what works, thereafter the rest of the players follow the 'guides' these 'hardcore' players generate.

Not going to quote the entire post, but..

I understand all of that, but times have changed. A wipe on Ifrit is a short break and a try again. I know it sucks to wipe, and I know people don't want to waste time and don't want to lose people and have the party fall apart, but even still. There's a lot of situations int his game where alternative job choices are fine but people still don't want to bring them. Most of the time they aren't even willing to think for themselves the reasoning behind strategies, thus allowing them to PROPERLY determine why they need job x and why alternative y may or may not be a better choice.

People don't want to bring those alternatives because of how simple and easy it is to switch jobs, thus it's easy to ensure you have the "optimal" (emphasis on quotes) setup. It discourages funky party compositions, discovery of new strategies, and leaves us running the same place with the exact same setup over and over... sometimes as the class or job we don't even want to play.