Two Jobs For Every Class

I've been back into FFXIV for over 2 years now and I find it much better than when I first played back in 2013. The first character I tried, which is listed as my main, was a Summoner and I loved it. I am a bit upset at the pet changes, loved sending Topaz Carbuncle/Titan in to tank while I cast from a distance, but I'll give it a try when I go back to pick up with ShB on him. While playing I tried to play SCH for a bit to see if I could heal. While the first time was bad, actually got booted from the dungeon while trying to learn, I also bought and tried WHM. I eventually came to the realization after going through a few dungeons with friends and coworkers from outside the game, that I'm not very good at healing. I had also tried tanking a bit by buying PAL, the same as my first character Aragorn that I never finished before then, and was ok. I'm nervous about it but still want to play the character anyway. The reason I never finished the first Aragorn was leveling was much harder in 2013. I eventually just bought the ARR story finisher and level 60 PAL for him and that's where he'll sit.

That's a bit of a long intro to set up my suggestion, but I wanted to give a thorough background. I like that fact that the Arcanist class has two Jobs for it, the DPS Job Summoner and Healer Job Scholar. I think it would be nice if each of the eight other classes each had two jobs as well, one DPS and the other a Tank or Healer, but not all 3. That's what the extra jobs are for. As I'm nervous and worried I may be horrible at Tanking I thought it would be nice to have another Job to fall back on without having to worry about getting another class/job up to that same level or push through until I can get to level 50 and get Samurai. It might also entice people to try tanking or healing same as Arcanist. Everyone of the friends and coworkers that play that I've talked about this with like that idea.

I have a few examples and I will refrain from names so as to not make it harder on the developers from using those names. With four tank and three healer jobs already, I feel the five DPS classes that would be getting tanks or Healers should be two more tanks and three more healers to keep an even balance. The first is Lancer getting a tanking job since it already shares with the tanks anyway. It could also share Paladin's shields if that give a hint of the name I've thought of. The other two examples are Conjurer and Thaumaturge. I would suggest that it would help to have these two basically swap White Mage and Black Mage, except for their elemental triples. Conjurer with Earth, Wind, and Water to Thaumaturge's Fire, Ice, and Lightning. Also like SMN and RDM, Conjurer's DPS would be able to help heal, even if it's just themselves. This allows the Healer a little more time to help heal the tank in difficult battles. They could also help raise fallen allies in particularly hard dungeons as well.

They will never being doing a split type job again. It's too difficult to balance. It's why SCH/SMN are so far apart from each other now.

Oddly enough, the balance issue was more of a thing when you actually leveled up your stats. Now that stats are pretty much 100% gear based, I doubt balance is that much of an issue.

They probably still don't wanna do it to increase the time it takes to level up all your roles/classes (which is understandable, they want as much reasons for people to keep playing indefinitely).

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Originally Posted by Stepjam

Oddly enough, the balance issue was more of a thing when you actually leveled up your stats. Now that stats are pretty much 100% gear based, I doubt balance is that much of an issue.

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This is categorically incorrect. The only issue that happened back when manual stat improvement was a thing was that you had to choose between 30 stat points going to INT to slightly boost your SMN dps or 30 points to MND to slightly boost your SCH heals. This was not a massive difference and definitely didn't affect balance in any meaningful way. It was annoying, and enterprising players could spend seals to switch between the two if they wanted, but it wasn't much of a balance thing.

The vast majority of one class two job balance issues came from the two jobs sharing skills. When two jobs share a large number of abilities, any change you make related to those abilities, even an indirect one, has to be considered for both jobs and that is hard to balance. In particular because the two jobs have completely different roles. E.g. Scholar having access to Bane, Shadowflare and Miasma 2 made them leaps and bounds ahead of any other healer in terms of DPS, but just reducing the DoT damage would penalize SMN. The fix was that they gradually gave SMN traits to improve their DoT damage, reduced the potency of the base DoT spells without upgrading them for SCH, removed multiple abilities like Bane from SCH, reworked basic mechanics like Aetherflow to function differently for each job, etc. In short, they have continually and gradually divorved the two jobs' skills over the last few expansions making them more and more independent from each other and thus easier to balance. This is also the reason why cross-class skills have gradually been tapered down into the much more limited role-skill system.

Another more extreme example of this is Guild Wars vs. Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars allowed subjobs with almost full access to all of the abilities from both your main and secondary profressions. They explicitly stated the main reason they didn't include any sort of subjob system in GW2 was because it was pretty much impossible to balance. Any change to even a single ability, even a minor change, had to be considered for not just the profession it belonged to but for all of them.

If they have to basically treat it as a brand new job that's fine with me. As long as they are linked to the leveling of the base class and are a different role, that's good enough for me. Unlike the stand alone jobs though they wouldn't have to come up with a new weapon types and sprites for them, they could recycle the ones they for the classes' main jobs. They would also have a starting point thematically for the lore as well. Just looking at the Marauder and Gladiator DPS jobs, they'd have to remove anything that generates enmity from the tanking side anyway. Those two could also reuse the Dragoon unique armor sets. For example the Shire Gear, they would use the Pathfinder's set while Lancer's tank would use the same Custodian's set that all tanks use. Same for the Thaumaturge's Healer using the Preceptor's set like all healers do, while Conjurer's DPS uses Philosopher's set.

I would welcome this. I’d really enjoy branching job stones. I though SCH and SMN were a great idea.
However I know to never expect it.

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Originally Posted by bluecrest5

I also bought and tried WHM. I eventually came to the realization after going through a few dungeons with friends and coworkers from outside the game, that I'm not very good at healing.

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Honestly, what were you expecting? Smh

Id also enjoy more branches to Jobs. Though they wont make them, cause it reqcuires too much work, especially in lore since theyd have to be like arcanist to branch off, not strict upgrades but specialists in different part of their kits and People already argue how that makes smn not smn. All in all i wish they did it but it would be wasted when all that people want is fancy particle effects over substansial game play.

My goal was to see if it was just Scholar that wasn't working for me. I actually found white mage easier but only the in lower level dungeons. Higher level dungeons were just harder in general. I prefered how White Mage had more big heals than Scholar's single heal with pets doing a lot.

I mean, as far as Scholar goes that changes a bit as time goes on. Each job plays a bit differently even if they can perform the same role. You can't just play one the same as the other and expect it to work. White Mage, as you pointed out, is very reactive, and has lots of big heals. Scholar is more proactive with the shields and such.

With regards to the proposal given you said that it's fine if they're new jobs what you're basically asking is that they double the number of jobs currently in existence. As neat as that might be hypothetically it isn't a practical request. I also feel like you'd want a third non-DPS role so every job could be a DPS/something else, and divide it a bit more evenly. But that's an aside as the core part, doubling up the number of jobs, isn't reasonable.

No I said it was fine if they had to develop them as if they were stand alone jobs. They would still use the same weapons and be linked to the leveling of the base class. My goal is more options with less time wasted if a certain class/job doesn't pan out. As far as development goes time goes, one of the most time consuming part of developing a new jobs is creating the sprites and animations from scratch. There are 3 options in this regard. Since stuff is already being pushed back anyway, first, push 6.0 back to accommodate all 8 branching, not completely new, jobs with no new jobs for 7.0 to get back on track. Second, do four of the jobs, Thaumaturge's healer and Conjurer's, Gladiator's and Marauder's DPS for 6.0 and the other for the 6.0 patches, once again not making any new ones for 7.0. The third is similar to the second, but putting the other four, 2 tanks and 2 healers, for 7.0.

You're still proposing doubling up all existing jobs though. Whether it's now or later on is kind of irrelevant. As far as what takes the most time when it comes to making jobs I don't believe they've given us any data on the matter.

Realistically? If this was a reasonable suggestion they'd have done it. They've gone on record with the exact opposite, they don't want to ever split jobs again. Which means the costs outweigh the benefits.

people are already upset over there being a delay for 5.3. you want to put in an even bigger one for an idea that the devs don't even want to touch?

I'll first address the delay part. That is only one of three ways they could do it. The third option is the best one. I only mentioned it to list what they could do, not what they should do. At this point though 6.0 is going to be pushed back anyway, how long will depend on the Covid panic.

As far as adding 8 jobs, they've done that already, not including Blue Mage. These jobs also wouldn't require the same amount of work as a full stand alone job would. The abilities would be all new but they have plenty of animations they can reuse to make the job easier. As far as not giving data on the most time consuming part of creating a job being the animation, I direct you to what they have said about the new races and all the time it takes to adapt each and every previous armor piece to the new race. Another example being over in Pokemon Sword and Shield and the main reason for why the National Pokedex is gone from new games going forward. The sprites they had to make for over 1000 Pokemon would have pushed the game back much further than the release it had. Recycling as much as they can from the class/main job, not necessarily abilities, can cut what I estimate to be 25% to even possibly 50% off the work load. For the sake of argument though let's go low and say 25%. That means they would be putting in the work for 3/4 of 8 jobs, the equivalent of 6. So then cutting that in half 4 is like 3 which is what they've have pretty much done since the ARR patches. We've gotten 9 new jobs, the first of which was a Class and a Job, Rogue and Ninja.

Now before you try to make the case that I'm grasping at straws here, I am well aware that there is a 99% chance this won't ever happen. I say 99 because a miracle could happen. The only way it's 100% is if I don't even try and I wouldn't have if I hadn't had anyone like the idea at all and it was just me. However, since all the people I know outside the game who play liked the idea, I posted anyway. As of right now I have 2 people who have seen this who are very much interested and over 400 views in just five days. I don't know if the views are a lot or not for the suggestion area but I find that significant for only a 5 day old post. Once again my goal is not just to add more jobs, that's just a means to get to the goal. My goal is to encourage people to try something out of their comfort zone when it comes to tanking and healing. if it doesn't work out, they have another job to fall back on without having to basically start over, just like someone can do with Summoner and Scholar. If it helps to think of this way, don't think of them as branching jobs, think of them as a main and an alternate job, since the build would basically be from scratch anyway. The alternative to this would be creating more level 30 jobs that you can pick up before Ishgard but that is still not as a nice as having an alternate job that levels up with the main job.

if this thread ever reaches like 30-40 pages then that'll be a success. never pray for miracles.

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Originally Posted by bluecrest5

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It's 100% not happening because they've already said they aren't doing it again. Pretty plain and simple. Yoshida and co are the only ones who know what is and isn't efficient for making new jobs. They obviously don't see this as an efficient use of resources. If they did they'd have been doing that instead of making new jobs entirely. It's also why I'm confident it's not a good idea. Yes, some degree of resources are saved, but it seems like the net effect is still negative. What gets saved from animations instead is spent on balancing the resulting jobs even more.

And they haven't done eight new jobs in one expansion. Three whole jobs was too much. I don't see any way the amount of resources spent on a single branch being equivalent to one fourth of a whole job, which is what it would have to equal out to get that kind of amount.