Why not abolish the Class system entirely in favor of Jobs? [@ Devs]

[Rhomagus]

I think they just don't want to have to rewrite any of the stuff that's in the game already.

Paladins are holy warriors that wouldn't be caught dead at a coliseum. Monks are spiritual ones that are more the "eschew earthly possessions" types than the kind that would run a gambling hall. Elemental magic (Fire, Burn, Flare) belongs to black mages, but you can't take it away from conjurers because they worship the elementals in the Twelveswood.

Basically, to replace them they'd have to redesign sections of every city, rework every reference any NPC has to those guilds and classes, and alter the storylines related to the ones that don't fit at all. It's a lot easier to just throw some NPCs in each that starts a quest to unlock a job. They're also scared they'll hurt our feelings or something by changing things too much when they're so set on keeping the servers running and our progress in-tact.

Cecil ruthlessly murdered Mysidians in the first 10 minutes of Final Fantasy IV.
Amarant Coral was a vagabond and hired assassin in Final Fantasy IX.

Does anyone else want to give their shot at correlating jobs with character traits and completely negate the possibility that there are individuals behind each playable character?

[Rhomagus]

While not always an appropriate variable...

-the best selling Final Fantasy games were ones with an open ended character progression system.
-the draw of MMO's is getting to play with others in a persistent online world and overcoming obstacles by coordinating with others in order to compliment your strengths and diminish or completely negate your weaknesses.

The proposed system, with what little information we have, effectively satisfies both a casual and hardcore audience. Unfortunately there are people that want to have their cake and eat it too. Which I'm fine with, but it's not your birthday, it's the company potluck. If you don't like cheesecake then maybe you should have brought something else to the potluck or had a nice hostess cupcake at home, by yourself, watching DVR'd reruns of Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

[Ronik]

I will address your points separately.

So what you're saying, is that there is more variety and useability in being limited to one job and half of another job versus having access to multiple job's abilities all at once? I don't see much of an illusion there. The job system mandates that certain people have to come as certain jobs to make things run smooth, where as in the current armory system people can swap out as need dictates. Again I state that being able to put what you want on a class and not be mandated to a certain set of abilities is still better. If you SAM/THF all you have are that SAM's abilities and half the level's of THF. I fail to see the flexibility, the only job from XI that really has player's choice is Blue Mage since you can choose what spells, and in turn traits, you have. Other than that, you're stuck to your main and sub's stuff. Being a BST/WHM for soloing isn't what I'd consider versatile. The only variety you have are your pets

Again, you make it painfully obvious that you have little no no understanding of how the subjob system impacted job roles in FFXI. Your vast over-simplification that the subjob system is merely "half the levels of another class" is a gross misrepresentation of what you gained through your choice of subjob.

Since I have increasing doubts that you have any significant experience with FFXI, I'd prefer if you don't bring it up in your arguments. There is tremendous flexibility in the subjob system merely because of how valuable certain traits/abilities were in FFXI. A Sam/War would do considerably more damage than a Sam/Nin, but be far more fragile. A Sam/Thf would have great aggro control and great burst damage, but weaker sustained DPS and slower TP gain. In ANY example, the subjob significantly augments the performance of the base job. This leads to many meaningful choices. Do I want to do more raw DPS? Can my tank handle me going war sub? Should I play it safe and help my tank with threat with Thf sub? Should I go Nin sub to lessen the burden on the healers and keep myself alive? When soloing, Dnc sub or Nin sub?

I challenge you to find any class abilities in FFXIV which so fundamentally alter your gameplay experience the way subjobs did. Yes, despite having access to all abilities from every class, there are no meaningful choices to be made. No, equipping Raise or Cure II on your Archer does not even come close to the depth of the subjob system.

And while those few cherry picked things may look minor, they are in fact what makes things catered to the solo/small groups. You don't need dedicated healers for leves or exp burning, it makes thing run a heck of a lot smoother having them I'll admit, but they aren't mandatory. Now that's not an every instance situation, in some they are absolutely necessary. Not only that, but here we are able to change on the fly where as in XI we had to go all the way back, change, etc. In XI is a healer d/c's and doesn't come back you're screwed. In XIV if a CON d/c's, and granted if someone else has it leveled, progress continues. Or if there's a total wipe save one DD, chances are there's a higher probability that DD from XIV has CON leveled to a point that he/she has raise versus XI where its subbed whm/rdm soley for raise. I haven't seen too many RNG/WHM or RNG/RDM out there and the ones I did see were subbed RDM for wildfire/trueflight only and that was all they were there for. But I know plenty of ARC, GLA and PUG that have enough levels in CON for a clutch raise should the situation warrant it. Again I'll say that I'll take being able to pick and choose what I want versus being told, "This is what you have, deal with it."

Uhm, the grind from 1-50 is quite casual at the moment. A dedicated player can do it in a week fairly easily. The cherry picked things look minor because they ARE minor. Changing the class system to a job only system will barely impact the levelling process as long as every class is given some baseline way to heal/drain/mitigate a little while solo. Your entire argument basically centers around equipping Raise/Healing spells on classes that cannot normally equip them. That's not meaningful and it's certainly not a hard choice to make when each spell only costs 2-3 action points out of what, 50-70 you have? Again, you only have the illusion of choice here. In FFXI, there were some real decisions to be made when a RDM subbed BLM over WHM. Here, it's pretty damned straightforward which abilities you want to be using at any given moment.

Granted subjobs gives versatility to the main jobs, but that comes at a price. I can change things on the fly in XIV, but in XI I have to go all the way back to my MH/Nomad Moogle to change subjobs which interrupts the flow of whatever it is that's going on. And now if a job implementation is put into the game, the elitism will come back where if people don't have things set to a way that's comfortable they'll get booted out of groups or whatever. And all of these "cherry picked" things are just that only because of the limited classes that are out right now, more will be released and more things will become available to us to choose from. Am I in favor of a job system to augment or specifically style a job for a set amount of time? Sure, why not since it would make things easier to set yourself to a job and have your abilities automatically change to that job's style. Am I in favor or abolishing the class and armory system in favor of job classes? No. NO. Hell. No.

I never said we need to implement a mog house. Job swaps can be handled on the fly by the same way the class system is - changing your weapon. Also, optimization is not the same thing as elitism. If you're running around as an Archer with 30 DD spells from Conjurer, you deserve to get booted from whatever party you're in. There is a such thing as playing your class well and playing it poorly, and if you think this reality is somehow tied to the premise of a job system, you'd be wrong.

[AlphaDragoon]

Cecil ruthlessly murdered Mysidians in the first 10 minutes of Final Fantasy IV.
Amarant Coral was a vagabond and hired assassin in Final Fantasy IX.

Cecil was a Dark Knight when he did that, but I see the point you're trying to make.

However, I do agree that changing everything to fit the old job names at this point would be way too much work. They should just add the new jobs with the traditional FF names as extensions of the original classes, like they're doing presently.

[Tsukino]

Cecil ruthlessly murdered Mysidians in the first 10 minutes of Final Fantasy IV.
Amarant Coral was a vagabond and hired assassin in Final Fantasy IX.

Does anyone else want to give their shot at correlating jobs with character traits and completely negate the possibility that there are individuals behind each playable character?

Cecil was a dark knight at that point and had to atone for it, becoming a paladin. It's beside the point anyway.

The point wasn't that people can't do their own thing, but that a congregation of those jobs would be focused on something different. A single monk may become a gambler, but as an order they would be focused on spirituality, not running a gambling hall. See the difference?

[Felis]

They are going to move abilities and spells around classes so CON> to WHM will make sense. I Really like the 1 Class = 1 job cause i think its lame you can lvl 1 class and have multiple lvl 50's jobs basically, I rather them make more base classes

They are thinking about cross class = 1 job for later, too
Class A + Class B = Job Y

[Ronik]

They are thinking about cross class = 1 job for later, too
Class A + Class B = Job Y

This would be pretty damned neat.

[Rhomagus]

Cecil was a dark knight at that point and had to atone for it, becoming a paladin. It's beside the point anyway.

The point wasn't that people can't do their own thing, but that a congregation of those jobs would be focused on something different. A single monk may become a gambler, but as an order they would be focused on spirituality, not running a gambling hall. See the difference?

.. and Amarant? By the logic proposed, Amarant as a character shouldn't/can't exist. Final Fantasy V introduced the job system and any character could be anything. The point still stands.

There's also nothing keeping them from separating them in that sense from a lore perspective. Pugilists wanting to atone. Gladiators putting aside their coliseum training. If I remember correctly you'll still need to unlock the jobs, you'll just be of the same level as your class when you do. Nothing needs to be rewritten.

[Tsukino]

There's also nothing keeping them from separating them in that sense from a lore perspective. Pugilists wanting to atone. Gladiators putting aside their coliseum training. If I remember correctly you'll still need to unlock the jobs, you'll just be of the same level as your class when you do. Nothing needs to be rewritten.

/facepalm

Re-read my original post, which is about exactly what you're saying. They can't replace the classes with jobs like the OP is suggesting because they'd also need to replace some of the guilds with ones that match jobs. They can add jobs to the existing system (and are) just fine because they don't require that.

.. and Amarant? By the logic proposed, Amarant as a character shouldn't/can't exist. Final Fantasy V introduced the job system and any character could be anything. The point still stands.

He's included in the rest of the explanation. There is no large group of people working as assassins-for-hire but calling themselves "monks" in the world of FFIX. He's a single guy, and you're right, he can do whatever he wants with his monk training.

Your "point" is both correct and utterly irrelevant to what I said, which is about the OP's suggestion to replace classes with jobs and how the guilds (not individuals in those guilds) would not fit.

[Rhomagus]

Cecil was a Dark Knight when he did that, but I see the point you're trying to make.

Yes but he was still the same character. Even as a Dark Knight he had his regrets for doing so. The point I was making was that the character is not defined by the role or the job. I am a human being, not a delivery guy. Delivering things is what I do, not who I am. Some people relish their jobs as their only form of identity when it's not the case. People and worthwhile characters are much more diverse and complicated than that.