[Theory] ACN removed, SMN remade

[Lemuria]

Yes you can. Just because they won't be playable doesn't mean they wouldn't exist in Eorzea.

E.g. Musketeer. Boom.

And what do you do about the many arcanists? Force them to become a summoner? Force them to become a scholar? Where exactly do you place these dual-job classes? It would be a logistical nightmare to sort through that mess, not to mention it would annoy the heck out of anyone still levelling the class.

What of other classes? The entire early quest line would have to be scrapped and redesigned to fit the new job-only system, and lore-wise people would still have job crystals so what happens if they unequip them? What would happen to those who were half-way through their 'class' quests, or had them opened in their quest log?

There's far too many variables for them to give it such a severe revamp, so it's unlikely they'll be doing away with classes entirely. More likely that they'll be using a job-only system for new jobs released.

[Parodine]

I really doubt they'll be removing base classes from any of the old jobs. I think they recognize the current state of the job/class system is rather pointless, so instead of continuing to prop up an old relic, they'll just make all of the new jobs they implement won't use the system.

Maybe unlocking those jobs would require getting another class to 30 first, who knows how they'll do it. But they never said they would dissolve the current class system for 3.0, just that the newer jobs won't be using it.

[Teryaani]

And what do you do about the many arcanists? Force them to become a summoner? Force them to become a scholar? Where exactly do you place these dual-job classes? It would be a logistical nightmare to sort through that mess, not to mention it would annoy the heck out of anyone still levelling the class.

What of other classes? The entire early quest line would have to be scrapped and redesigned to fit the new job-only system, and lore-wise people would still have job crystals so what happens if they unequip them? What would happen to those who were half-way through their 'class' quests, or had them opened in their quest log?

There's far too many variables for them to give it such a severe revamp, so it's unlikely they'll be doing away with classes entirely. More likely that they'll be using a job-only system for new jobs released.

Truth. There is (basically) no way for them to wipe away the relic of the job system in 3.0. I wouldn't be overly surprised if they pick away at it though and you start seeing it change around the full expansion after heavensward.

[Krr]

And what do you do about the many arcanists?

Give them Summoner and Scholar levels are their current Arcanist level.

What of other classes? The entire early quest line would have to be scrapped and redesigned to fit the new job-only system,

No they wouldn't. You re-tag every lancer guild quest as a dragoon quest. You re-tag every conjurer guild quest as a white mage quest. Your character's lore story remains the same, just minus unnecessary and confusing legacy mechanics.

and lore-wise people would still have job crystals so what happens if they unequip them?

Nothing. Your job stats and abilities are folded into your base class. I mean really, all that oh-so-important crystal does is give you some bonus stats, 5 abilities that you want all the time anyway, and force you to rearrange your entire skillbar when it gets reset back to the hideous default at level 30.

Lore-wise you're the only living White Mage left in all of Eorzea. Why hasn't S-E deleted all the others from the game yet?

There's far too many variables for them to give it such a severe revamp, so it's unlikely they'll be doing away with classes entirely.

Except...no one has described any mechanical reason why we can't just retag every class quest as a job quest and give everyone job icons at level 1, and then say each job can take a limited set of abilities from two subjobs.

I highly doubt we'll see a Summoner remake, though.

[Sove92]

no one has described any mechanical reason why we can't just retag every class quest as a job quest and give everyone job icons at level 1, and then say each job can take a limited set of abilities from two subjobs.

This guy did.

As a game tester, I start working on games shortly after the engine is working and a few starting zones made.

To make a change like this would break the game so badly at this point.
So many switches broken
So much game logic broken


Better off making new job and starting fresh vs changing old job.

Oh ya and then there is Bob he worked on this part of the game and quit so now we need to go through every line to find out where some random text is that we want to remove/change.

[Krr]

This guy did.

He must work for some truly inept programmers if he thinks refactoring every 'Lancer' flag to a 'Dragoon' flag and checking for some outlier cases would be a more disastrous and unstable undertaking compared to any other changes the game receives.

I guarantee you the testers are wading through a hell of a lot more broken builds due to the constant redesigning of Revenant's Toll than they ever would reporting some issues with job flag vars being altered.

The UI overhaul needed to accommodate the removal of classes is probably a more dramatic undertaking than changing a few refs and doing some test cases to make sure they're still stable.

[Sove92]

He must work for some truly inept programmers if he thinks refactoring every 'Lancer' flag to a 'Dragoon' flag and checking for some outlier cases would be a more disastrous and unstable undertaking compared to any other changes the game receives.

Why can't we still queue on DF with a chocobo out, if adding a few more checks is so simple? Because it is not so simple, there are so many different dependencies with such a critical component as the class system that removing it is no longer worth the effort, it should have been done when 2.0 was still in development.

[Krr]

Why can't we still queue on DF with a chocobo out, if adding a few more checks is so simple?

Because if you understand coding, refactoring variables is not "adding a few more checks." It is "changing the inputs and outputs of some checks in a minor way that doesn't otherwise alter the logic tree."

You aren't actually 'removing' or 'adding' any game logic by removing classes and replacing them with level one jobs. You're simply changing how existing logic takes inputs. Data sets != logic.

DFing with your chocobo out would require restructuring an entire set of complex network logic and make it account for multiple edge case inputs.

I am a little curious, if Arcanist goes into both SCH and SMN, does one of them get a new 1-30 questline?

Probably not, unless the developers want to do something special for one of them. I could see adding 3-5 skill slots for DoL skills, since they're basically QoL to begin with and don't mechanically impact combat to begin with. Even the stealth abilities don't really do anything in a dungeon.

[Tupsi]

He must work for some truly inept programmers if he thinks refactoring every 'Lancer' flag to a 'Dragoon' flag and checking for some outlier cases would be a more disastrous and unstable undertaking compared to any other changes the game receives..

This..I've seen RPG Maker games not even break horribly because of a flag removal lol.

Why can't we still queue on DF with a chocobo out.

Because it's designed as a party member - A type of party member that can't enter dungeons, thus you can't queue with it because you're flagged as a party. They can get it to work if they wanted to but at this point they progressed so far it would be more work than not to go back and redo the party system, hence why you'd sooner see it be done for an expansion or later patch than you would something "now."

[Sove92]

This..I've seen RPG Maker games not even break horribly because of a flag removal lol.

RPG Maker isn't complex enough to break from that like your typical AAA game would. And you are talking about a flag removal, that's small, removing a critical component is a major code change.