Jobs growth past lvl70?!

With new expansion, most people expect level increase (which, one should be honest with themselves, is pretty much guaranteed). With that comes the "growth" of jobs. New options to be had. However, button bloat is a thing.

How can it be solved?! Hypothesize, suggest, share your hopes/opinions away.

Skills cut out? Fused together? More traits in place of skills?


Personally, I would like stances (as abilities!) for all classes, but rather than "DPS stance" and "tank/healer stance" or the like, I'd prefer stances that offer bonuses that are not opposites. With each stance, different kind of "specialty" skills would be available.

For example, for a White Mage, one could have "Wind Stance" which increases casting speed and gives access to an instant, but comparably weak, targeted AoE heal (a weaker but wider and instant Cure III) and an AoE Esuna with a cooldown, and a "Water Stance" which increases healing done by some amount (dependent on speed cast increase), and offers a more powerful single target heal with a cast time and cooldown (short'ish, 20-30sec), that adds a short regeneration effect to it, and a "preemptive esuna" that prevents the next debuff or two that can be healed from being applied on target. The skills would be available only in one or the other stance, and another set of skills could be available only without stance. With only two such skills per stance, there's a total of six skills (eight if adding the stances) that can be added, at the expense of four new skills to add to the bar (the stances and the two shifting buttons).

For some jobs, specific abilities could change the stance automatically on top of their normal effect, similar to monk, but unlike for monk which goes in a specific order on every skill, only some of that stances specific skills would shift it and one could continue to remain in it otherwise. A job oriented around this version of stance dancing could be made for a new "feel", too, where half or so of the skills would shift along with whatever stance the character is utilizing mid-combat.

Personally, I don't see ability 'bloat' as a problem. Large numbers of abilities with niche uses translates to complexity and depth; it encourages spending time truly mastering a job, rather than finding the optimal rotation with a quick Google search and repeating ad nauseum.

That said, I think stances would be a rather good addition to FFXIV, regardless of one's views on ability bloat. Reminds me of the Elementalist class in Guild Wars 2, which I found to be very enjoyable. I'd also advocate for a return of a system along the lines of Merit Points in FFXI, something that could dovetail rather nicely with stances.

I feel like they'll just add traits that will add auto-tiers to current attacks. Kind of like Ruin has a chance to become Ruin 4.

Other idea might be no new skills. I know it sounds cray but if you shower the playerbase with a cartload of content other than skills, they might actually be okay with it.

Don't most jobs have a stance already?
The job gauge has things that are normal before it fills, changes some skills entirely, alters some skills, empowers some skills, gives access to unique skills.

Giving all jobs straight up stances like monk would make the game feel redundant or make every job feel like others or take away from the unique game flow some jobs have compared to other jobs. Minus the elemental stances(blm and monk), this idea seems more like how dancer would implemented in this game.

I love tp and mp in my other FF, but there I could be healer, tank, or dps or a mix of all so a global resource made sense. Here attribute points were stripped, open cross classing was stripped, role actions are only useable depending on the job. I doubt merits would ever come into the game until maybe the twilight years. For an FF with a one job, one role, definition, we need skills/traits/abilities designed with that same focus.



I would rather:

1. Jobs lose the global resource of tp and mp and each have unique resources like blood gauge(tp/mp was built more for ff with open roles and customization, the job gauges could become more defined with info with that open space tp and mp bars no longer take)
2. More skills get revised or trimmed with some more skills replacing/changing older skills on the hotbar as you gain levels
3. The effective-ness of job gauges being looked at and how each one makes gameplay feel inherently different between jobs, revise the less useful ones and streamling them on the whole towards pristine implementation.

Maybe introduce talent trees, which let certain skills transform into another skill. This should bring something new and keep the amount of skills on the hotbar the same.

I too would prefer they don't add more new skills.

They could add
- Traits for more procs to get a free/instant/increased [X]
- Skills that are direct upgrades (so they replace the previous skill entirely, like Stone in WHM) with an upgrade in potency or radius or added effects
- The stances from the OP
- Equipment procs - certain gear has the chance to do [X] when using [Y] skill, or maybe it provides [X] buff when [Condition is met], so people look forward to using different types of gear combinations instead of new skills

And add more indirect battle things
- There are loads of QOL wishlists out there.
- New achievements that ask players to do specific things in instances
ex1. Do [X] boss without being hit by any AOE
ex2. Perform an emote on a boss (emote is picked randomly per player and the player doesn't know which it is)
ex3. Kill all adds within [x] seconds during [y] phase

Re-introduce the merit system in ffxi that allows accumulation of an EXP pool at lvl cap that can be spent on improvements or augments to existing skills or traits? I kind of wish this was already here so I could do something with all the "wasted" exp on capped jobs... >.>

Adding new skills with increases to lvl cap I feel would be better accepted if we also got a streamlining of skill combo chains atleast for melee jobs like we have in PvP though I think more growth would come from added or new passives that could add more to what is already there and save the addition of new actual skills as something that would be a really big addition to the job.

For melees (and RDM) they can always have the combos in one button. There's no reason to press Combo 2 or 3 when you haven't pressed Combo 1 or 2. That would give them a significant amount of space for new weaponskills and abilities.

They can also remove some existing abilites and make up for the lost ability.
Right now I think WHM shouldn't have a lot of AoE heals like Medica and Cure III. I know they do different things but I can see Medica and Cure III getting combined. The combined AoE heal is like Medica normally but becomes like Cure III in potency when an ally is 50% or less in HP. Just an example.

There's also skill upgrades or traits which they're doing already.

Kinda don't want to go back to stances. I'm really liking them removing some of the bloat, though not all of it. Ninja poison affected what Jugulate did and you had to make sure you put either of them on in the first place and sometimes I forgot to turn cleric off when healing or dpsing with cleric not even on.

Yeh stances can be interesting, like there could be one that turns certain single-target spells into aoes, getting a lot of double functions out of single buttons. Warrior has lots of twin buttons already which cuts hotbar bloat a lot (cyclone/dec, beast/cleave, equiHP/equiTP, unchain/release). Man... warrior is designed so well.