One minor criticism

I love this game, just like all of you, I think it immensely superior to WoW. I quit WoW long before the exodus here in recent years.

However the one minor criticism of this game that I have is that there is no specialisations, so if I want to play something like a Paladin (which have traditionally been all 3 roles), I need to be a tank.

It really puts me off being a Paladin, because I love the look but just don't want to tank dungeons and raids. Its sad that there weren't more choices when it comes to classes, I know that makes it harder to balance and I'm not complaining to be petty...

Just makes me a little sad is all. (Healer main btw)

It makes me sad that every time someone has a complaint they feel they need to put "I love this game" in the first sentence, for fear of being jumped.

To your point though, I actually agree that this game could use some sort of Specialization system. Afterall in FFXI some classes used to be able to have different roles altogether (NIN used to be a tank etc)

Yoshida DID just promise us another 10 years of story and content for this game so who knows?

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Originally Posted by Maxilor

It makes me sad that every time someone has a complaint they feel they need to put "I love this game" in the first sentence, for fear of being jumped.

To your point though, I actually agree that this game could use some sort of Specialization system. Afterall in FFXI some classes used to be able to have different roles altogether (NIN used to be a tank etc)

Yoshida DID just promise us another 10 years of story and content for this game so who knows?

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Disagree Specialization finally will settle to Meta builds has no meaning once the meta is theocrafted. I am sorry DPS paladin has always been odd to me. Look at current PLD for me is what PLD should be Magical warrior with healing ability, text book , and Paladin DPS is super fun. I understand some people don’t want tank responsibility but it is what it is.

I would prefer for the developers to try and achieve a decent balance between jobs within the respective roles (without just straight up homogenizing them) before ever implementing specializations. I don’t really think they would be all that healthy for the game; and would just be a balance nightmare.

Yeah, I do add this disclaimer because I have been jumped on before for expressing my opinion. I enjoyed Paladin healing in WoW and when I first came into this game, I thought Paladin was going to have a healing option but it wasn't.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

I love this game, just like all of you, I think it immensely superior to WoW. I quit WoW long before the exodus here in recent years.

However the one minor criticism of this game that I have is that there is no specialisations, so if I want to play something like a Paladin (which have traditionally been all 3 roles), I need to be a tank.

It really puts me off being a Paladin, because I love the look but just don't want to tank dungeons and raids. Its sad that there weren't more choices when it comes to classes, I know that makes it harder to balance and I'm not complaining to be petty...

Just makes me a little sad is all. (Healer main btw)

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I would argue that the specialization system from WoW is rendered unnecessary by the Armoury system here. And also, historically in Final Fantasy (and also in D&D, which the first Final Fantasy was pretty clearly based on) Paladin has never been anything but a tank.

Final Fantasy 3 - Paladin has the special ability Cover, which intercepts physical attacks aimed at low HP party members.
Final Fantasy 4 - Same as above (Cecil after proceeding through the Mount of Ordeals)
Final Fantasy 5 - Same as above (though called Knight).
Final Fantasy 6 - Knight's Code/True Knight relic grants the ability to use Cover
Final Fantasy 11 - Paladins are pretty much exclusively tanks
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance & A2 - Paladins gain abilities like Defense, Cover, and Parley (which can convince an enemy to leave battle)
D&D 3.5e - Paladins have the heaviest armor, are one of the few classes with shield proficiency, and have a spell list that has primarily buffs, and are meant to be played to place themselves in between the enemy and the squishy mages.
D&D 4e - Paladins are explicitly the Defender class of the Divine power source. Defender is literally a tank, and they gain abilities that force enemies to engage them or take severe penalties if they decide not to.
D&D 5e - Building on 4e, they get some of those abilities again as spells, able to magically force a particularly dangerous enemy to face them instead of their allies.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

However the one minor criticism of this game that I have is that there is no specialisations, so if I want to play something like a Paladin (which have traditionally been all 3 roles), I need to be a tank.

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Except, in FF, Paladins (or Knights as they are known in Japan) have traditionally been one of the more beefy units to have with one of the iconic abilities being 'cover' to take damage for someone else. Useful for games where you do not have a strict aggro system so that you can better emulate that effect.

However, I'm going to go back on what I always say on these topics. They might as well make a new job rather than try and force a current job into another role. We already know how that turned out (Summoner and Scholar was a failed experiment after all) so lets go over a few points.

Actions. Paladin has a fair few defensive actions, Sentinel, Holy Sheltron, Divine Veil etc. Each one would have to change to something else as that is way too much defensive utility to have on a DPS. Then you have potencies, each action would likely need a potency change to make it more inline with a DPS. As for weapon, do you really want a DPS in this case using a sword and a shield? Wouldn't a DPS have just a sword to maximise their ability with the sword, without a shield getting in the way? How about gear? Would they use the same gear (making any gear with Tenacity useless for the DPS) or are they going to use another set of gear, which means a whole new set of weapons. As for animations, do you really want another job that has the exact same abilities so that it doesn't stand out from another job (I acknowledge some might not mind)? This is also ignoring all the problems that they had between Summoner and Scholar.

When you take everything into account and the work that is involved, you might as well make a new job from the ground up, the issues become even bigger if you wanted to make a Paladin a healer, with an even greater part of its kit needing to be changed to accommodate. The transition from melee DPS to Tank and vice versa is probably the easier one to swap around, however, you cannot just keep a system restricted to those, you would have other wanting a caster MCH that shoots magick bullets, or maybe a reverse Red Mage where they spend most time in Melee with a casting phase. The work would be way too much for something that is probably going to be a nightmare to balance and they should keep the jobs restricted to the roles they were made for.

Plus, the only reason WOW has different specialisations (in my opinion anyway) is because you cannot change your job, or class or whatever it is called from when you make your character, so if you want to play something else, you need a new character. Specialisations are just a way for you to potentially fill a slot that is needed rather than change characters (though from my understanding, it isn't a quick process to change specs either). in FF, if you want to play a different role, you swap jobs.

However Cecil could use the Cure line of spells, Esuna and other white magic.
In FFIX Beatrix (A Paladin/Knight) could one-shot you with Climhazzard and Shock... but I don't see the Paladin in FFXIV one shotting mobs.

I don't really see your point... its not like Final Fantasy hasn't played around with classes before. They could very easily give a tanky/healer version of the Paladin.
Plus their armour is literally the coolest in the game.

There is no beefy, tanky healer in this game... that's the issue. You are limited to jobs that take 1-2 hits and die in the healing role.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

However Cecil could use the Cure line of spells, Esuna and other white magic.
In FFIX Beatrix (A Paladin/Knight) could one-shot you with Climhazzard and Shock... but I don't see the Paladin in FFXIV one shotting mobs.

I don't really see your point... its not like Final Fantasy hasn't played around with classes before. They could very easily give a tanky/healer version of the Paladin.
Plus their armour is literally the coolest in the game.

There is no beefy, tanky healer in this game... that's the issue. You are limited to jobs that take 1-2 hits and die in the healing role.

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Paladins could use cure in the old cross class system, but that has been replaced with the role system. Plus, Paladin has Clemency, which is essentially their own version of Cure (Cure was useless as it scaled off of Mind, Clemency scales off of strength).

Beatrix was wiping out your party for story reasons. She is an incredibly powerful knight storywise after all. Plus, by that logic, basically every character had a way to deal guaranteed 9999 damage, does that mean every job represented there shoudl also be one-shotting everything? Think about that for a second.

Other FF games were mainly single player where balance is not important and experimentation was encouraged. The difference here is that some semblance of balance has to be held. You cannot have a healer than can take hits better than the other healers otherwise that isn't fair as they can survive more and potentially survive things that they shouldn't, making them mandatory. It's the same reason why tanks deal less damage than DPS. If tanks did do the same damage, you would just take more tanks over DPS. Might as well take the ones that can take hits and deal it back with the added benefit of even more defensive utility. You need the balance.

Thing about it is unless WoW changed since back when I played it on initial launch and the brief second and third chances I gave it when its first and second expansion came out. WoW needed talent specializations because your character was stuck as that class at creation. Where as FFXIV allows you to level and play every job on 1 character. You dont need to respec your PLD into DPS because you can just change to a DPS job.

It would be nice if we had glamours for jobs that made our weapon look different. AST could have crystal balls, WHM/BLM could have wand and shields back, etc etc. We already let PLD tank with their shield hidden so it's not like these little changes are unheard of or game breaking.

A WHM with their wand and shield would look a lot like holy pally (well, more resto shaman but same deal with the mainhand-offhand :P).

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

It would be nice if we had glamours for jobs that made our weapon look different. AST could have crystal balls, WHM/BLM could have wand and shields back, etc etc. We already let PLD tank with their shield hidden so it's not like these little changes are unheard of or game breaking.

A WHM with their wand and shield would look a lot like holy pally (well, more resto shaman but same deal with the mainhand-offhand :P).

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Regarding the PLD shield, there is an item that glamours it to be invisible. It was first available during the Garo event, and I think there’s still a version available in the Gold Saucer? I can’t remember if they took it out with the rest of the gear from there after the event ended or not.

EDIT: misread and thought you were talking about letting PLDs hide their shield versus already being an option. Apologies.

One-handed weapons and shields for WHM/BLM are a 1.0 carryover. Don’t expect them to return, as they were mainly left in the game for any 1.0 player that came back to the game and had a character with one equipped. I know they had some 2.x ones, but it’s a fairly abandoned system at this point.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

Regarding the PLD shield, there is an item that glamours it to be invisible. It was first available during the Garo event, and I think there’s still a version available in the Gold Saucer?

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Correct! The Garo version is gone, but they still have the Emperors available to them.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

One-handed weapons and shields for WHM/BLM are a 1.0 carryover. Don’t expect them to return, as they were mainly left in the game for any 1.0 player that came back to the game and had a character with one equipped.

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Merely a suggestion to add visual diversity without having to rework the code in the game to add more weapons and animations. Those stances already exist in the files from 1.0, and would be the easiest to implement to suit OP's needs. Thus, I brought it up.

I think specializations are there for games where your character is limited to a single class, thus enabling a single character the option to play multiple roles as needed depending on available specializations for that class.

FFXIV doesn't have that restriction. Even having SMN and SCH be tied together in FFXIV is a mistake, in my opinion, even if I did benefit from it.

On the other hand, specializations (and talent systems), just don't feel good to me. You flip a switch and suddenly your paladin forgot how to do an ability. Of course, you can also make that argument with FFXIV's job system, but that is to a lesser degree as you're changing the entire job. A paladin is still a paladin and knows all abilities that a paladin should know to be a paladin and never forgot any of it (job changes aside during various patches of the game).

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

Yeah, I do add this disclaimer because I have been jumped on before for expressing my opinion. I enjoyed Paladin healing in WoW and when I first came into this game, I thought Paladin was going to have a healing option but it wasn't.

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They could totally add a new class at some point, who knows. I don't think we need specs personally just because we can swap jobs easily enough, but I totally understand the desire.

The specialization system is generally covered as a different job - you just have to learn it from scratch (or level 40 or so depending). So when you want to DPS, instead of playing a Paladin, you play a Samurai, or maybe a Dragoon. it varies.

Personally, I wish there were a class that let you do DPS damage, and still have a shield - in WoW or FF. My Paladin is fun, but he's kinda slow at killing things compared to other classes. But that's a discussion for another time. :-)

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

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so if I want to play something like a Paladin (which have traditionally been all 3 roles), I need to be a tank.

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In WoW, yes, but as SnowVix pointed out paladins in Final Fantasy games and tabletop are the fighters and knights. When I play in tabletop, I'm a holy knight protecting my party and the skills available to me are patterned around that. There may be some instances of one or two utility spells like a heal or special attack, but paladin just isn't traditionally a damage dealer in media outside WoW.

I always wished there was some minor job customization in the game. Not in the same way as GW2 or WoW has but maybe more in the sense that as a machinist you could choose to either be more of a gunner type with reduced cd and maybe more damage on your gun abilities or be more of a mechanic type with a stronger robot and maybe even getting an extra turret or robot to go along it. I mean just small flavor things to give an illusion of choice.

It will be interesting to see what they do over the next 10 years, because this engine has held them back a lot. All the limitations from 1.0 that they had to work around.

At the same time, I think a really drastic structure change would be better off done in a brand new game. I expect they'll mostly stick to the formula and optimize and improve where they can.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

However the one minor criticism of this game that I have is that there is no specialisations, so if I want to play something like a Paladin (which have traditionally been all 3 roles), I need to be a tank.

Its sad that there weren't more choices when it comes to classes

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WoW needs specialisations because you can play only one class per character. In FFXIV you can play literally every class in the game on one character, including any additions that come in the future. There is significantly more combat choice per character in FFXIV than in WoW.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

I enjoyed Paladin healing in WoW and when I first came into this game, I thought Paladin was going to have a healing option but it wasn't.

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FFXIV is a different franchise made by an entirely different studio so the class fantasy isn't going to be identical to WoW. Paladin in FF has always primarily been a tank class. It's been like that for over thirty years.

I don't think we're ever going to get specializations. It's already complicated enough to balance so many jobs, adding specializations would double or triple the complexities and work required easily.

But even if specilaizations ever come, I doubt we're just gonna have the tanks as-is but with DPS-appropriate dps numbers, because tanks have the second easiest dps rotations in the game (the easiset being the one-button spam of healer) and such big utility (damage reductions, invulnerabilities, etc) it's unfair to the DPS jobs. And if those tanks have their skills and abilities adjusted to match DPS jobs, then they're not the same jobs, they're just new jobs that happen to wield those same old weapons.

And then the practical question of ROI will inevitably be asked: is a properly all-new job a better investment of resources? Or is a half-new job with old existing weapon types a better invesment? Common sense says it's going to be appealing to more players and potential players to build new jobs out of completely new weapons.

WoW has proven time and again that class/job specs are a balancing nightmare. Let's just...not, please.

The problem with the specialization system is that it then makes game balance even more of a nightmare. FFXIV is probably the most balanced MMO out there, despite the doom and gloom from some, with usually just minor tweaks needed to bring jobs in line. A game like WoW with all it's specializations has huge gaps in balance where some classes are just conplete jokes because they're so far behind other classes.