Could have SE unknowing set FFXIV to fail....

[Schizm]

This is more of comparing the job system within FFXIV. The one thing I liked about FFXI was even against heavy odds, people found ways to beat the tank-healer-dps system. Players were given tools to make soloing, even though difficult, possible.

With dungeons and end game content, it's so dependent on tanks that a DPS player could not survive soloing and end up being driven down like a nail in wet soil. There's no way that I can see a party of Bards or Black mages making grounds in content.

Funny thing I always mention is in the strategy guide for Ninjas for FFXI, they said it was a hard sell in the subjob area. Who knew what it became when people figured out ways to use it as a subjob.

Could they break the Tank-Healer-DPS system? Would it be too powerful if they did?

[Luvbunny]

Nah, the trinity class is great. It is less flexible indeed, but it is far more controlled and easier to balance content. And it's not excluding jobs XYZ if you are not the VIP Job of the Month. FFXI is the worst, cherry picking certain jobs, and pretty much decide the rest of the rooster are crap since you are not monk, ranger, samurai, bard, scholar and white mage. Those are the VIP jobs of the moment on FFXI, Paladin is used heavily for some bcnms, but pretty much deemed useless for others. We do not need that discrimination here.

[Prototype909]

Nah, the trinity class is great. It is less flexible indeed, but it is far more controlled and easier to balance content. And it's not excluding jobs XYZ if you are not the VIP Job of the Month. FFXI is the worst, cherry picking certain jobs, and pretty much decide the rest of the rooster are crap since you are not monk, ranger, samurai, bard, scholar and white mage. Those are the VIP jobs of the moment on FFXI, Paladin is used heavily for some bcnms, but pretty much deemed useless for others. We do not need that discrimination here.

Discrimination happens in XIV anyway, just in different forms. In XI it's have the preferred jobs, in XIV it's "know the T9 dance or boot after one wipe" or "hit X dps". In XI fights are decided by players playing their job to a high level, in XIV it's 8 players playing a single player game and hoping the other 7 people don't lose their single player game. In XI if you make your own groups you can go in with non-standard compositions and still clear, just like you can make your own groups in XIV with people who know the fights or are willing to accommodate people who are learning. People prefer those jobs because they're time-tested strategies that guarantee a larger percentage of success with pick-up groups, no different than people not wanting to take first timers into Coil instances or EX primals.

[Cyrus-Wallace]

Well, Guild Wars II did the same thing. I actually prefer the trinity, so most of the jobs have the same value because they're needed roles.

[ruskie]

Why do people assume you are limited in this? You can do funruns with various things. True for most stuff you need atleast one tank and one healer but beyond that parties can be anything you want. We're going for as many sch as possible t5 fun run recently. So it doesn't really limit you in that.

[File2ish]

If this game broke out of the trinity system the game would just break. While we don't have support jobs or even jobs with a lot of utility (I mained Red Mage and Dancer in FFXI), what we do have is balance.

Our current setup with the trinity has us pretty much locked into position with the duty finder. The support role isn't nearly as enticing as damage dealer, and they'd either have to add another slot to the duty finder for 5-10 man content or replace one of the DPS slots (possibly two for 8 man content). Thus, it would be a pain to balance and keep everyone happy.

I could right an essay on the subject, there's so much that has to be considered in order to keep everything balanced out for the content we have among many many other things. If X, then Y, BUT if the tradeoff for Y is too steep no one will play it, HOWEVER if X is too powerful it could replace this other role's duty entirely and people would just stack this job and ignore the others.

Unlike FFXI, this game was built on the grounds that it has to be balanced for everyone. BLM needed a single target damage buff because heavy movement killed it's DPS. WHM's Presence of Mind got buffed because it was near useless because of the recast and nobody ever used it. Paladins started having trouble holding hate in the high end because Flash couldn't keep up with the damage output of other jobs, so buff. Stacking WHM or SCH in Frontline made it extremely hard for the other team to kill you, so HP regens don't stack anymore in PvP. Etc.

(Before they added Trust Companions and otherwise made the game far more accessible in many aspects): In XI you could do pretty much any job combination and have it work out for you in some way. Want to pop a lottery spawn NM? Sub RNG or BST for Widescan. No Adventuring Fellow and you need heals as a WAR? Sub DNC or even WHM.

The tradeoff, however, was that the game lacked balance. A RDM/NIN could solo pretty much any mob in the game using a mix of Stoneskin, Blink, and Utsusemi to mitigate pretty much all damage while using auto attacks and DoTs to whittle away at your target. Or NIN/DNC, if you get hit when Utsusemi gets taken out by an AoE just waltz your HP back. But if you wanted to solo content as say a DRK/WAR, unless you could kill mobs extremely quickly you were shit out of luck since you can't heal yourself outside of using potions (which were more useful than ARR's, but were still no replacement for cures).

[kyuven]

The trinity exists for a reason. There's even a deep seated psychological gravitation towards it even in systems that don't focus on it.

There's a degree of "blandness" to the classes purely to prevent what's called "character select forcing." We already see it with the overall preferred group make-up be: 1 WAR, 1 PLD, 1 SCH, 1 WHM, and 1 BRD for raids with the other slots filled by whatever. But that's NOTHING compared to other games.
In FFXI, certain job/subjob combinations were just plain laughed at.
In EQ1, there was a time when you NEEDED a group consisting of a warrior, cleric, and enchanter in order to get anything done. The concept of multiboxing was refined so people could have a healer in their party to actually do things. I should mention that EQ1 had, at launch, more classes than FFXIV has jobs. 14 classes in EQ1, with 3 of them being absolutely required until they got around to giving the other tank and healing classes new toys to play with.
Thankfully those days are long gone. I'll take the holy trinity over being pigeonholed like an EQ1 druid any day.

In addition, as some others have mentioned, the Support role is traditionally less popular than even healers and tanks. It's much easier to just give the different parts of the trinity some form of support and thus give variety and viability to the disparate jobs, rather than have ANOTHER role that forces long queues because not as many people want to play it.

[Morningstar1337]

There's a degree of "blandness" to the classes purely to prevent what's called "character select forcing." We already see it with the overall preferred group make-up be: 1 WAR, 1 PLD, 1 SCH, 1 WHM, and 1 BRD for raids with the other slots filled by whatever. But that's NOTHING compared to other games.
In FFXI, certain job/subjob combinations were just plain laughed at.

Are people gonna add 1 NIN to that list?

[Luvbunny]

Indeed, I do not want to see the "YOU MUST PLAY JOB XYZ" or don't ever bother trying to do anything endgame activities because you simply will not get invite unless you play healer or support jobs. Bard + Corsair + Whm + Mnk + Ranger + Samurai is pretty much the job, and mostly everyone else just tell the newbies to level Bard or go home lol. I like this game much better, balance is the key here. The roles are simple to get into but not so easy to master if you want to play it correctly. Sure, all roles have their rotations, but they are much better than FFXI bazilions spells. Less is more. I rather they focus on variety of contents for the current roles that we have, so we can play many different things.

[kyuven]

Are people gonna add 1 NIN to that list?

Not likely. People really overestimate the value NIN adds to the party. a 10% debuff every 60 seconds for 10 seconds IF they manage to set it up correctly doesn't make them as infinitely more valuable as people seem to want to believe. If anything they just make the bards less overtly necessary. Number crunchers have really blown the whole situation out of proportion.
And Dancing Edge doesn't stack with Storm's Eye. Really aside from that 10% debuff, which requires more set-up than some people think, there's nothing Ninja brings to the table that another class doesn't also bring, while also bringing their own perks to the party.