You all think sub-jobs was a missed opportunity?

Like you can have Machinist have a sub-weapon and become a Corsair or Cannoneer

Astrologian with Geomancer

Warrior with Berserker

Black Mage with Magic Knight

Dragoon sharing skills with Machinist (Like Edgar from FF6, it was simply called Machinist though in that game)

Paladin having a DPS sub-job called Templar from FFT

So on, so on.

They would all share the same weaponskills, but some skills being exclusive.

I know its been talked about before, but its fun to think about what could have been. :o

pass.

hard enough to balance what they have without adding even more things.

plus, then they start thinning out the ability pools making it impossible to add things they may have planned without gutting something else (which never pleases anyone ever)

No, I'm glad we don't have them to be honest. Would be a mess to deal with

SE balancing team in shambles watching this thread

Something like that would be great in a single player RPG, or in an MMO along the lines of the original Guild Wars. The devs are very committed to trying to keep the Jobs balanced, however, which is largely why the similar cross-class stuff went away over time.

GEO would have been a much better fit for CNJ than WHM was (given the whole 'nature mage' idea CNJ has), but SE needed a specific healer and at the time (late in version 1.0) it was easier to just shear CNJ of elemental spells (specifically Fire, Ice and Lightning spells which were given to THM) so it could concentrate on it's healer side rather than make a new base class for WHM which would have theoretically taken CNJ's healing/buffing spells.

Of course giving two Jobs to one class would have solved that, but SE probably just lacked time to develop that concept and so held off on it til ARR. And it's pretty clear now that the 'two Jobs off one class' experiment was a dismal failure (when you said 'sub-Job' I thought you were meaning like FFXI's 'add another supplmentary Job to your main Job to boost it's stats and abilities, as that wasn't nearly as effective as it appeared on paper either).

Hence I'm pretty certain I can bet my Curtana on stating that SE probably feel the same way and are quietly wanting to seperate SCH from ACN/SMN and make it it's own Job.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

(when you said 'sub-Job' I thought you were meaning like FFXI's 'add another supplmentary Job to your main Job to boost it's stats and abilities, as that wasn't nearly as effective as it appeared on paper either).

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I hear this now and again, but (having not played FF11) I don't really understand where it stumbles in practice.
Can you elaborate?

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Originally Posted by ItMe

I hear this now and again, but (having not played FF11) I don't really understand where it stumbles in practice.
Can you elaborate?

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Because it became about the meta, what sub Job gave the best benefit to what main Job based on stat boosts it granted and the abilities it gave (because when a Job was equipped as a sub-Job, it could be no higher than half the current level of that Main Job it was equipped to - the big ones was tanks subbing the non tank DPS NIN solely for a single ability (Utsusemi, which granted 'shadows' that absorbed a single attack) as well as allowing dual-wielding single handed weapons for pretty much any other Job that could use them, PLD subbing WAR for Provoke, mages subbing BLM for Warp (teleport to your home point) and MP boosts or WHM for teleport spells, but there were others too. And if you dared think outside the box, you simply were shunned and could not get parties.

Yoshi is concious of this and hence he is actively trying to avoid repeating this problem in FFXIV at all costs, hence we have homogonized classes based on role, but at the cost of having little choice or alternative options with using another class's abilities.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

GEO would have been a much better fit for CNJ than WHM was (given the whole 'nature mage' idea CNJ has), but SE needed a specific healer and at the time (late in version 1.0) it was easier to just shear CNJ of elemental spells (specifically Fire, Ice and Lightning spells which were given to THM) so it could concentrate on it's healer side rather than make a new base class for WHM which would have theoretically taken CNJ's healing/buffing spells.

Of course giving two Jobs to one class would have solved that, but SE probably just lacked time to develop that concept and so held off on it til ARR. And it's pretty clear now that the 'two Jobs off one class' experiment was a dismal failure (when you said 'sub-Job' I thought you were meaning like FFXI's 'add another supplmentary Job to your main Job to boost it's stats and abilities, as that wasn't nearly as effective as it appeared on paper either).

Hence I'm pretty certain I can bet my Curtana on stating that SE probably feel the same way and are quietly wanting to seperate SCH from ACN/SMN and make it it's own Job.

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In Final Fantasy Tactics, GEO was a melee DPS with some debuffs. It had a stronger physical attack trait than any other Job.

In FFXI, it is an ultra powerful buffer, a heavy nuker, and can hit frighteningly hard with staff weaponskills.

GEO can be a lot of different things.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

Because it became about the meta, what sub Job gave the best benefit to what main Job based on stat boosts it granted and the abilities it gave (because when a Job was equipped as a sub-Job, it could be no higher than half the current level of that Main Job it was equipped to - the big ones was tanks subbing the non tank DPS NIN solely for a single ability (Utsusemi, which granted 'shadows' that absorbed a single attack) as well as allowing dual-wielding single handed weapons for pretty much any other Job that could use them, PLD subbing WAR for Provoke, mages subbing BLM for Warp (teleport to your home point) and MP boosts or WHM for teleport spells, but there were others too. And if you dared think outside the box, you simply were shunned and could not get parties.

Yoshi is concious of this and hence he is actively trying to avoid repeating this problem in FFXIV at all costs, hence we have homogonized classes based on role, but at the cost of having little choice or alternative options with using another class's abilities.

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I guess it's just one of those things that sounds great, but has trouble working outside a single player game (where you don't have to worry about how your play affects someone else's game and it isn't designed around the majority of your gameplay having the enemies at par with your team, so you can just out level the enemy if you want to use a suboptimal combination/consider it a challenge run.)

Bit sad that it isn't a thing in XIV, since I love to manipulate stats to make up for my generally poor in action game play, but I can see why it was truncated, then removed. (also because it meant levelling a second Job, which could be problematic if you needed a healer or tank sub job but didn't feel up to playing either of those roles.)

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.

Subjobs? No. Branching jobs? Yes.

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Originally Posted by KitKatnip

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.

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That's simply because their implementation was awful, why would anyone design something that levels coexistingly with another class?

The obvious solution was to lock base classes to 30 and move everything else to job stones.

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.

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

Like you can have Machinist have a sub-weapon and become a Corsair or Cannoneer

Astrologian with Geomancer

Warrior with Berserker

Black Mage with Magic Knight

Dragoon sharing skills with Machinist (Like Edgar from FF6, it was simply called Machinist though in that game)

Paladin having a DPS sub-job called Templar from FFT

So on, so on.

They would all share the same weaponskills, but some skills being exclusive.

I know its been talked about before, but its fun to think about what could have been. :o

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It's just a legacy system that has no place in our current game.

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.

I can only wish. I prefer rpg over tightly balanced monotonous gameplay