If it is not broken, DO NO FIX IT!

[Abriael]

Please do the community a favor and stop posting such ridiculous garbage.

Please do the community a favor, and respect people's opinion. Otherwise, you have no place in a discussion forum.

A mage has never been able to wear heavy armor and chainmail, sweet lord, what games have you ever played where mages wore mail? I'm dying to know. Did you not play FFXI? From the get go, certain jobs could wear certain armor and were limited by job/class, and that included the melee jobs at level

LOL. You talk like mages exist in reality and they have never been able to wear heavy armor.
1: armor realistically can be worn by anyone. Some people are more trained to wear it, and will receive a certain benefits, others are less, and will receive less benefits. That's what simple logic dictates. It's both realistic and convenient gameplay wise, not to mention the fact that it allows more freedom in looks.
2: There are plenty games, both videogames and pen/paper RPGs, in which there are several caster-types that can wear heavy armor. Your perspective of the genre is, apparently, quite limited by the (probably few) games you played.
3: this is not Final Fantasy XI. There are other games around than Final Fantasy XI.

There's no lack of class uniqueness? Even Yoshi-P has said he feels there isn't any uniqueness!

The fact that he humors the masses doesn't mean that he really thinks that.

How can any job be unique when you can use any traits from other jobs and essentially make them all the same?

Because they're not the same. The class affinity system makes sure that you'll never be as effective as the original class when using a skill with another class. Also, there are further limitations in place, for instance non-caster classes can't cast AOE. Finally, there are evident differences in HP, Mana, Defence, physical attack and such, that makes it so that for instance, a melee class cannot nearly heal as effectively as a caster, simply because he'll run out of mana in 2 minutes flat, and he won't have significant ways to get it back in time.
If you don't know the ins and outs of the system, don't blame it on the system.

Obviously you are in the minority

Luckily Games development is not a democracy.

Look where that got them with 14 when they tried to reinvent the genre, they even said they tried to make the game different on purpose, and it clearly suffered because of that.

What got them where they are has been releasing an unfinished, content-deprieved, unchallenging game. The basic systems, though, are solid, and people would enjoy (and understand) them much more if they were finished and polished, if there was sizable content, and if that such content was challenging enough to test them to the limit.

Classes appear all the same to people lacking insight, because there's NO mobs, out there, that challenges them to their limit, forcing people to stay in the role they are most EFFECTIVE at.

I challenge anyone reading this thread to name ONE group-oriented mob that they find anywhere challenging or difficult to beat in this game.

In a system that features any degree of versatility, there's no need to specialize unless challenge is present. Once challenge is present, people will have to stick to the role they can perform better in order to survive. And be viable.