Study: What do you consider every job's "Identity" in XIV?

The term "Job Identity" gets brought up often. You tend to hear it in topics of job design. Job design being, I feel, a hot topic these days in the expectations broiling surrounding Dawntrail, it got me wondering how exactly people tend to view each individual job under the lens what exactly their identity should be, and how that identity should contribute to or dictate the job's design and gameplay in XIV.

I say XIV specifically, because while it is a Final Fantasy game and draws from that pool ideas and concepts, it is it's own title and crafts it's own concepts in many areas.

So, the question stands: What do you consider to be, or should be, each job's 'identity' in FFXIV?

Paladin: sustained damage, fairly rigid rotation with multiple starting points, physical specialist
Warrior: lifesteal, balancing offence and defence
Dark knight: dark arts, sort of halfway between war and pld, mp management, magic specialist
Gunbeaker: Honestly still don’t really get what it is

White mage: elemental counterpart to black mage, limited mobility, high potency gcds with little weaving
Scholar: arcanist that found a sch stone. Commonalities with acn/smn such as rouse, Bane and multiple dots. Control over fairy eg embrace macros, fairies with different roles/actions.
Ast: time mage and cards. Flexible, unique faster cast time to accommodate card play. Cards with different effects and impact on gameplay
Sage:idfk scholar2 I guess

Ninja: trick attack, pseudo caster
Dragoon:long chain of attacks, jumps, the ability to accidentally place yourself in the aoe you’ve just fled
Bard: sort of utility dps, aids party with buffs, proc based
Summoner: pet and dot, a more damage oriented counterpart to scholar with clear shared traits but divergence as it leans more into the allagan primal angle. Also demis should never be until they can work without killing the pet action queue.
Black mage: immobile pyromaniac with no end of movement tools. Continuous high output of damage similar to paladin rewarding fight knowledge rather than being able to give yourself carpal tunnel.
Machinist: random bs go
Samurai: builds up to high damage strikes
Red mage: kind of like a backwards ninja
Dancer: bard but single target
Reaper:leviathan
Blue mage: able to learn whatever with little regard for balance, only fun. 80 update missed the mark somewhat I think.

Edit: I was going to leave monk out as a joke, but for completeness: fluid rotation getting faster as the fight progresses. Greased lightning kind of sucked mechanically when there was forced downtime, but nailed the identity.

I’ll start off with the tanks.

PLD: Support tank using white magic. I feel like it really hit the nail on the head in stormblood. It was really a shame when they nerfed cover because it is PLDs iconic ability and it really felt like it in that expansion rather than the gimmick bolt on it is in every other expansion used for basically nothing but cheese strats. Clemency also felt a lot more useful, it has been nerfed so many times and they added healing on to so many other aspects of the job that it has really dropped in effectiveness, don’t get me wrong it’s still a great heal but it’s definitely not what it used to be.

WAR: There are so many potential identities for WAR. The middle ground tank between offence and defence, the counter tank, the high aggro tank with high HP and self healing but little mitigation. It has been so many things just in the FF series, let alone if you include other games. Right now it feels like it’s trying to be all of them and it’s making WAR far too powerful.

DRK: It’s hard to assign DRK an identity because its primary identity in the series is a DPS. It sacrifices HP to deal increased damage and that does not translate well to a tank. It has however had some tanky elements to it in previous games that they could have adopted for a tank DRK (and they basically used none of them). In FFX-2 and FFXI it had access to dark magic which gave it access to things like drain to recover HP, aspir to recover MP, drain-VIT to steal an enemies defence and raise its own, drain-STR to lower an enemies damage dealt and raise its own, dread spikes to absorb health whenever an enemy struck them and bio, a DoT that also lowered the enemies attack power, aswell as abilities like blood weapon to steal HP on hit. But the identity they seem to be going for with DRK is some kind of magic tank that uses MP to create barriers… so basically rune knight.

GNB: Once again it’s hard to give this an identity as it’s based on one character in one game in the series who had no actual set role. But given the lighter armour design compared to the other tanks and the idea of having increased striking power with the weapon based on good timing on a trigger pull, i’d say a parry tank fits it the best, perhaps having shorter duration cooldowns with decaying effects so you need to time their use as close to when you need them as possible. Right now it feels like it has absolutely no identity and is just somewhere between DRK and PLD.

Personally, I define job identity moreso over the gameplay than the job's "style", since that one tends to get muddled with how often roles have to share gearsets with other roles - often leading to looks that I loathe. If I had a dime for every time maiming sets looked the same as fending sets, making Dragoon look like a plummeting tincan instead of a jumping threat, I'd be rich. And while it's easy to say "summons define the summoner", plenty of reworks of various classes, in particular AST and SMN, have shown just how exchangable a lot of these things are.

Now, while I have all jobs in the game (minue BLU) at 90, I only play a handful in endgame content, so for some of these my idea of what the job aught to be might be ill-informed, but here goes nothing:

Paladin: The "gimmick oGCD" tank. Lots of stuff to press in between GCDs, along with some unique skills like cover and the ranged part of their rotation that don't really exist in other tanks really define its identity for me.
Warrior: The "I can heal" tank. Alongside with holmgang's short cooldown, the ability to self-sustain without losing uptime is really what defines Warrior to me.
Dark Knight: The Damage tank. In fights with lots of re-openers, their numbers are just insane, to the point where I'd consider it their defining feature.
Gunbreaker: The APM tank. Do you like cramming a lot of button presses into a very short amount of time? I am awful at it, so this sort of subsumes every other point of their identity for me.

Monk: The "micromanage" DPS. Is my DoT falling off? Is my buff falling off? How many chakra am I sitting on? Which form am I in? Oh god, there is so much to keep track of, please make it stop. MNK's pure business defines it for me.
Dragoon: The oGCD DPS. Absolutely zero brainpower required to think about GCD rotation. DoT reapplies itself automatically. One can focus entirely on the plenty oGCDs and fight mechanics in general, which is its unique property.
Ninja: The minigame DPS. I can just never separate anything NIN does from the mudra minigame you gotta play to go through it, mostly due to bad memories still lingering when it was a lot more ping reliant and I saw a lot of bunnies over my head.
Samurai: The "slow and steady" DPS. It feels the most "chill" out of all the melee to me. Its pacing is roughly the same throughout all the fight, with burst windows not feeling much busier than the rest. I'd also define it via its very high skill floor: It's very easy to be decent at Samurai. But it's quite tricky to be great since there's a lot of micro-optimisation, without it feeling overbearing like Monk.
Reaper: The two-mode DPS. I mostly define it over how different its two phases feel, with the rapid increase in GCD speed when transforming. It's gonna be interesting to see how much Viper will encroach upon that identity and how they'll differentiate it from Reaper.

Bard: Oof. Has seen so many reworks over the years, even I struggle to define an identity for it anymore. It seems like it should be the predestined support DPS, but that spot has been so thorougly taken by...
Dancer: The support DPS. I doubt I need to elaborate on this one. It's easily its most defining feature.
Machinist: The APM DPS. Basically GNB but for DPS. I define them in a very similar way, only for different roles.

Blackmage: The pre-planning optimisation DPS. While a better BLM might be able to do it on the fly, to me BLM is forever defined by how much pre-planning there needs to be done in order to play it efficiently. Knowing where attacks are potentially hitting ahead of time so you don't end up placing your laylines in the orange that's about to pop up, saving your triplecasts for the right moment, making proper use of Aetherial Manipulation to be able to keep casting for longer... In a way, it is the "strategy optimisation" DPS rather than a "rotation optimisation" DPS.
Summoner: Originally I had it as "DoTs DPS" but obviously that went out of the window with the rework. Now, I'd say its identity is the "mobile Caster", but honestly, that just makes it more similar to the ranged physical DPS. As a result, I'd say SMN currently has one of the weakest identities in the game gameplay wise.
Red Mage: The RNG mitigation DPS. Admittedly, this identity has become weaker and weaker with each expansion, as more tools to do just that have been added to the toolkit. Originally it felt like playing around whether certain spells procced or not, but that is slowly being drained away (ironically by adding quality of life to it, similar to AST - see below). As such, I doesn't have a very strong identity either, but still more than than SMN.

White Mage: The Big Healer. It doesn't have a strong gameplay identity save for its raw healing power. Originally I defined it more as the "MP healer" who never runs out of resources save for death, but as the other healers, AST in particular, had their MP gain buffed, this has faded.
Astrologian: The gimmick/support healer. Plenty of buttons that do unusual stuff compared to other healers, even if all the more interesting cards were taken away two reworks ago. And then, of course, the DPS-increasing cards. I guess you could also add the RNG to what defines their identity, for better or worse (definitely worse).
Sage: The resource proc/passive healer. When I think of Sage I mostly think of how proccing their resources works, requiring some forethought on when to use what skill to do so. Sadly, this means anywhere below endgame, their identity becomes just "passive healer" as Kardia goes brrr.

Scholar: This one I just don't play enough to have any opinion on. I guess the "complicated healer" since it looks super intimidating in complexity compared to the other three healers.

For the jobs I play I’d say…

WHM: Direct power healer with an answer to every heal mechanic. High dps 0 support (ew). Lilies are intended to afford it more mobility than other healers and Afflatus Misery gives it a ‘healing into damage’ refund, reducing the need to balance between basic attack spamming and healing.

SCH: Support healer with focus on utility/buffs rather than direct heals. It should be able to debuff too but apparently that’s just too much for healers. Fairy support sets them apart from other healers. Is frequently misunderstood because of how poorly the devs initially implemented it. Abilities and spells tend to be weaker or more convoluted than those of other healers. not a DoT DPS healer with summoner skills lol

SGE: An offensive healer that heals through damage. A fairly straightforward and generally simplistic identity, but somehow they still failed to implement it properly.

AST: Support healer focused on rDPS / party damage as opposed to Scholar’s more defensive support/utility. Time-related heals are integral to the identity, as are the card mechanics.

BRD: Party support oriented DPS that buffs the party rather than being purely focused on its own dps. Heavily proc based; the current version is a patchwork of every mechanic it’s had in every expansion, bar Heavensward’s casting. Fails spectacularly at delivering on its identity.

DNC: Party support oriented DPS that buffs the party rather than being focused on its own dps (lol this seems familiar). Has an incredibly slight leaning towards direct healing as opposed to Bard’s ability to buff healing, but it’s only expressed in two abilities (one of which is literally unusable for its intended function because it’s a channel on a goddamn dps). Heavily proc based. One of the few jobs that actually delivers on its identity overall.

SMN: Harder to say since it’s changed so much. Overall I’d say the identity of Summoner is as a high-potency ‘nuker’ type that utilises summoned beasts to deliver its attacks. I still predict the poisonous not-poisonous (it’s corrupted aether not literal toxins lol) DoT thrower identity will likely be relegated to the new caster job. Leaving Summoner with its overall - albeit highly simplistic - identity of ‘deals big damage with summons’.

RDM: More of a straightforward one as the devs have been fairly consistent with its identity through its lifespan. Red Mage is the ‘Jack of all trades’ DPS that’s capable of supporting with various roles whilst maintaining their role as a dps. Throwing out support heals, buffing the party’s damage, debuffing the enemy, support raises. Maintaining the balance of magic and swordsmanship also gives it the unique identity of requiring rapid repositioning / planning, which no other job really has right now besides melee and positionals.


Lastly: DISCLAIMER - these opinions are ones held by me based on the developers previous actions, changes, and things said in interviews and the like. These are the theoretical or ‘intended’ identities as perceived by me and do not reflect how those identities are expressed in practice

every job is some form of "burst DPS" bar healers if your definition of the term is stricter than mine. I wish I had something actually worthwhile to contribute on this topic but I feel very burnt out on XIV's PvE job design right now.

Citation:

---

Envoyé par fulminating

Dragoon:long chain of attacks, jumps, the ability to accidentally place yourself in the aoe you’ve just fled

---

I resemble that remark!!!

;)

PLD felt like the defensive tank, WAR like the inspiration tank (keeping your party alive with heals and mits), DRK felt like high risk high reward DPS tanking, while GNB was the "Jack of all trades".

WHM is the power healer, SCH is the defensive healer, AST is the support healer and SGE is supposed to be the offensive healer.

BLM is supposed to be reading into the dark arts for Destruction so it's all DPS, RDM is the jack of all trades job (probably the best implemented even if they find it hard to balance), SMN is the inbetween BLM and RDM.

The phys ranged are support DPS, so Defense (MCH), Offense (DNC) and Full Support (BRD).

Melees are kind of in a similar spot too: Full Offense (Striker (SAM), Support (MNK) ), whereas (Maiming DRG(SupportCrit) vs RPR (SupportDMG)) and Support (NIN) vs what I think is gonna be a more full DPS oriented class Viper..

The following are my opinions entirely, influenced by what I learned and how I play the game:

WHM: In a glance, they seemed to be the on demand 'big bursty' of the healer siblings. Very reactive. Able to pile up lilies, amplify said burst heals, dump a massive burst of heals when needed (hello Cure III), and supplied by several other bursty nature abilities whether it's more healing (assize, lilybell), or damaging (assize again, and misery).

SCH: The 'resource maintenance, totem healer'. Packing a boon of mitigative potential but requires slightly more foresight to pull it off effectively. Based on their past iteration and current existence of Chain, it seemed like they're the more support-oriented of the healers, leaning toward debuff application & supporting their party defensively.

AST: "FASTro". Plays heavily to the aspect of a time mage because you press so many times f*cking button in 15s through the use of delayed heals and (in the past) extension of buffs. They're also the support-oriented of the healer like SCH, but instead focusing more to amplify their allies' damage through the use of not-so-random cards. I often joke that this is your "Gacha Healer".

SGE: "Less thought-Weaker SCH", "Pseudo Barrier Healer". Wait.. for real though, Idk. There's just no real identity to this newest healer besides "hahaha space lazor oops I forgot Kardia exist." and "please take more damage I need mana."

MNK: (At least until they remove Greased Lightning) Felt like the "need for speed"-of the melees as opposed to strong, single attacks.

NIN: The 'debuffer' of the melees (Old Trick Attack R.I.P.).

SAM: The 'I build gauge to unleash ultimate finisher'-melee.

BLM: A turret with constant high output rather than bursty like the rest of the existing jobs saves healers. "I don't wanna move" is their motto.

PLD: The 'selfless, most support oriented' of 4 tanks. Being only recently reworked to put more emphasize on their spellbade action though, I'm not sure I want to call them having any 'constant sustained damage' as an identity anymore.

WAR: The 'berserker, self regen'-tank based on what I remembered reading from their older iterations but they accidentally made the arguably best 5th healer in the game.

DRK: The 'magic oriented'-tank that relish in hurting themselves (lmao half joke) to unleash more fury.

GNB: DPS in a tank's trench coat. The thrill seeker of the tanks. (Can I do my mini burst here and still execute my planned mits? Oh Oh... let me do my miniburst while I move the boss.... skiiillffulllyy... oh f### time to shoot myself on the head with Superbolide).

Can't say anything for the rest 'cause I either don't play them much or I'm just bad with them. Or both.

I feel like a job's identity should be able to be described in very simple terms that can be broadly interpreted through mechanics. Whether or not they currently succeed in delivering these identities can be up for discussion.

PLD: knight
WAR: berserker
DRK: self-sacrifice
GNB: recklessness

MNK: body-weapon
DRG: spearhead
NIN: assassin
SAM: discipline
RPR: gluttony

WHM: restoration
SCH: swiss army knife
AST: fate manipulation
SGE: medic

BRD: rock star
MCH: engineer
DNC: cheerleader

BLM: destruction
SMN: summoner
RDM: duality
BLU: magic trick