Possible removal of Classes

[Zhamkyong]

The 1.0 lover in me totally agrees. A lot of the magic and fun for me and what originally drew me to 1.0 was how open booked roles in the game originally were. A lot of the fun came from working a role from the mix of possibilities that worked and fit the player.

Signed, a former Lancer Thaumaturge Dark Dragoon hybrid.

Never got a chance to try that system sadly, how was it exactly?

[bass9020]

Never got a chance to try that system sadly, how was it exactly?

The classes in 1.0 were an open book more than set classes. Like 2.0 the weapon determined the class you were playing but in 1.0 everything was more related to that than the character. Levels even used to be called ranks because you were ranking up the weapon type of that class. Also all abilities and spells were free to be used on any class, so you could be a gladiator who used magic. The downside was all crossed abilities had lower potency and I think longer cool downs?(don't quote me on that one though)

The guilds played a much more important role as well because you were able to spend guild tokens to buy other abilities or traits that you could use to help with the cross class abilities. This was the general twist of it (I'm not very good at explaining things sorry)

[Aylis]

Never got a chance to try that system sadly, how was it exactly?

It might be more easier to show you then explain ^.^ here's a very old video I made from those days that shows roughly how it worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUR-lPpEbsU Basically nearly every skill for every class was up for grabs as a cross class action. Want to be a mage with tank skills? It could be done, want to be an archer healer? It could be done. Players had 10 cross class abilities they could take at max level and each skill had a set number of allocation points. The more higher level the skill, the more points it costed to put it in your cross class ability bar. When you leveled up, you got a number of points you could use to spend on whatever cross class skill you wanted from all the classes you unlocked.

The downside was all crossed abilities had lower potency and I think longer cool downs?(don't quote me on that one though)

Lower potency definitely, the cool down timer was the same. Plus the other risks (taking magic on a melee class which didn't have the MP pools of magic classes, etc)

[MistakeNot]

It might be more easier to show you then explain ^.^ here's a very old video I made from those days that shows roughly how it worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUR-lPpEbsU Basically nearly every skill for every class was up for grabs as a cross class action. Want to be a mage with tank skills? It could be done, want to be an archer healer? It could be done. Players had 10 cross class abilities they could take at max level and each skill had a set number of allocation points. The more higher level the skill, the more points it costed to put it in your cross class ability bar. When you leveled up, you got a number of points you could use to spend on whatever cross class skill you wanted from all the classes you unlocked.

That actually sounds far more fun than the current system.
One of my pet peeves with the current system is how disconnected from each other the classes/jobs are. By this I mean that when you switch from one class/job to another EVERYTHING changes - your levels in one have no effect at all on your abilities in another. (Except for cross-class skills. IMO they should do more cross-class stuff instead of less.)

Add to this the lack of meaningful choices when developing a character: For each class/way there is only one good way of distributing the bonus points; At any given level there is a certain set of Best-in-Slot items, meaning that there is only one "right" way of equipping your character, and any other choice is making the character worse.
The only real exception to this is the cross-class system - which they are supposedly moving away from.
Result will be that characters will be (and already mostly are) just generic, interchangable "Class/Job" characters - everything about them can be described by just their Class/Job, level, and item level.

The current Class/Job system design is one of the least good parts of this game, and they are moving in the wrong direction with it.