Save Scholar: Add one last Class to the game.

[Shurrikhan]

I still don't know why people cite problems with XIV's implementation of the class > job system as conceptual flaws to the idea of having a broader opening class to a later, more focused advanced class (or "job").

Just because a class allows you to level to the point that a job begins, or is somehow attached by name, doesn't even mean that it needs to directly transfer a single skill or trait into the branching job, nor that its traits or trait-based mechanics would have to be limited to what the class produces...

Alternatively, take the latest cross-role system. There's nothing to prevent the PLD, DRK, and WAR versions of the 20% for 20s per 90s mitigation buff (Rampart) from having a different name and animation on each.

Why the false ultimatums?

[KisaiTenshi]

I still don't know why people cite problems with XIV's implementation of the class > job system as conceptual flaws to the idea of having a broader opening class to a later, more focused advanced class (or "job").

Find any video from Wizardy Online talking about cross-classing and Elite classes and it will immediately become obvious why the class-Job system is bad. Final Fantasy I's class-job upgrade was lifted directly from Wizardy's Elite classes, just using different names. Where as in Wizardy the elite classes were 50% one and 50% the other class, in FFI you just got additional skills in the same class, and it wasn't half of anything.

From a design concept, you can pull 10 skills from any/all classes, some of these are useful, many are not. When you upgrade to Job, you get restricted to 5 skills, and only "useful" skills.

So the upcoming Role system does away with being able to cross-class anything from another role, but it's ultimately the same thing, just now you can't have Tanks with Healer skills, or DPS with tank skills. To simplify things further they removed skills that overlapped too much to reduce cross-bar creep.

To really look at how the Job system in FFXIV really works, you have to go back to FFV. You initially start in "Freelancer" and can switch to any job without changing your base level (that's how FFXIV V 1.0 worked) That base level was stripped out and now you can only switch between jobs you have main hand weapons for. It's an improvement but also screws up the job-progression since you can't fork off a class into two different jobs of a different role, as one of those jobs will be "half and half" (see my wizardy statement above)

So ultimately the intent was something that MMORPG's were trying (or in some cases had tried already and wound up switching to a role system too), but didn't actually do well. Historically even in single-player RPG games, being able to arbitrarily change the class of the character leads to a kind of power creep where one specific configuration leads to nothing but face-roll gameplay.

Could you imagine if you could just cast X-zone/Death on every monster and it would be over like in FF5 and FF6?

Just because a class allows you to level to the point that a job begins, or is somehow attached by name, doesn't even mean that it needs to directly transfer a single skill or trait into the branching job, nor that its traits or trait-based mechanics would have to be limited to what the class produces...

Alternatively, take the latest cross-role system. There's nothing to prevent the PLD, DRK, and WAR versions of the 20% for 20s per 90s mitigation buff (Rampart) from having a different name and animation on each.

Why the false ultimatums?

Players want to be outraged. As an equal comparison in the game Mabinogoi, up to a certain point, the game had no actual classes, you could learn any skill arbitrarily, and if you screwed up you "rebirth" back to level 1 and level other skills, repeat every week. Then Nexon decided to introduce actual classes into the game and there was extreme rage and in-game protests in Korea and in North America about "stuff being taken away" like not even close to the outrage with WHM here is. Nexon relented a little and didn't put in any of the debuffs, but you only get bonuses if you pick a class, which means any class you pick gets double training points, but if you use skills outside that class, regular "freelance" training rate. This feature otherwise would have made it so "healer" players unable to do any content alone.

People actually preferred that "min-max BiS" freelance mechanic and didn't want to become yet-another-cookie-cutter Fantasy WoW game. Classes means they actually have to pick sensible classes for content, and since new content skills often had the same progression as old ones, it was very possible to have every skill in the game, and still suck at hard content because because you don't know which skills are useful in certain content, and newer content often required using the new skills, and if you use the new skills on "hard mode" versions of old content, it was still a face roll. Like people made a point of solo'ing all old content using no skills at all because the base strength (no level sync) ensured there was no challenge.

FFXIV's best features is the level sync mechanic, because it ensures you can't just spam a dungeon in 30 seconds by running straight to the boss room and flicking the bosses nose and having them die. You can't be carried by having one over-powered player just blowing through the content.

One of FFXIV's worst features is the cross-class system, because it does not enforce picking useful skills for your role, rather it discourages teamwork by having every one pick the BiS skill, and ignoring everything else. The Role system, in theory means the role skills can be divided between the players playing that content in 8/24 man content, where as before everyone just picked the same thing.

As much as I hate being "forced to play a role", I would rather that be enforced during party play to encourage teamwork rather than everyone-for-themselves style play that many other MMORPG's evolve into, because the content becomes too easy too quickly. If Square-Enix is guilty of anything, it's allowing the content to become easy by not adapting the content to the player's power-creep as part of level-sync. If there is a 20% differential between wearing level 50 gear and level 60 gear in a dungeon that is level synced to 50, then (4) players are at least 80% too powerful once level sync kicks in, and in 8-man content, 160% too powerful. So what will happen with level 70 gear? Will players be able to just solo level 50 content while synced? I think that needs to be addressed.

[Shurrikhan]

Find any video from Wizardy Online talking about cross-classing and Elite classes and it will immediately become obvious why the class-Job system is bad. Final Fantasy I's class-job upgrade was lifted directly from Wizardy's Elite classes, just using different names. Where as in Wizardy the elite classes were 50% one and 50% the other class, in FFI you just got additional skills in the same class, and it wasn't half of anything.

From a design concept, you can pull 10 skills from any/all classes, some of these are useful, many are not. When you upgrade to Job, you get restricted to 5 skills, and only "useful" skills.

Again, this is a fact of implementation, not of Broad/Progressive vs. Focused/Advanced tiered classes.

So the upcoming Role system does away with being able to cross-class anything from another role, but it's ultimately the same thing, just now you can't have Tanks with Healer skills, or DPS with tank skills. To simplify things further they removed skills that overlapped too much to reduce cross-bar creep.

Locking out cross-role skills (e.g. those that would allow a DPS a tank skill or a tank a DPS skill) eases development's ability to keep the relative value of different skills more equal across progression (where these skills would otherwise be traded out in favor originally of survival and latter of damage assuming that the fight isn't built around DPS checks, as per post-Gordias design promises), but it has nothing to do the broad/advanced class tiers concept itself.

Further, trading out one set of actions for an equal number of actions does not reduce cross-bar creep. 5 is 5 is 5. Granted, the total spread of options within these new choices do appear slightly more varied and worthwhile. But that has nothing to do with creep.

To really look at how the Job system in FFXIV really works, you have to go back to FFV. You initially start in "Freelancer" and can switch to any job without changing your base level (that's how FFXIV V 1.0 worked) That base level was stripped out and now you can only switch between jobs you have main hand weapons for. It's an improvement but also screws up the job-progression since you can't fork off a class into two different jobs of a different role, as one of those jobs will be "half and half" (see my wizardy statement above).

Either a particular implementation works in its then-current context or it doesn't. It's history is irrelevant to that. The loss of Physical Level did not necessitate class-based bonus stat allotments nor shared skills, if that's what you mean by "half in half". The decision to base bonus stats ONLY on class, rather than overriding with a new allotment set when swapping to a job branching from said class, and the decision NOT to modify any inherited spells did that. These are not necessary limitations.

So ultimately the intent was something that MMORPG's were trying (or in some cases had tried already and wound up switching to a role system too), but didn't actually do well. Historically even in single-player RPG games, being able to arbitrarily change the class of the character leads to a kind of power creep where one specific configuration leads to nothing but face-roll gameplay.

Examples? The only reason stacked or narrowing class choice would result in power creep is if the game specifically failed to balance the weight or outputs from different roles, classes, or other forms of load-outs. (See EDIT.)

Could you imagine if you could just cast X-zone/Death on every monster and it would be over like in FF5 and FF6?

As above, that would simply be a failure of balance — of implementation. None of this is relevant to a system of having Broad & Focused class tiers. I can understand your thoughts on the subject, but not what relevance your post here has to what you've quoted of mine.

One of FFXIV's worst features is the cross-class system, because it does not enforce picking useful skills for your role, rather it discourages teamwork by having every one pick the BiS skill, and ignoring everything else.

EDIT: This seems to be where we don't see eye to eye. Picking BiS skills and making best use of them through optimal gameplay is teamwork, technically. It might not feel particularly "together we stand", but if that is where design has placed the optimal advantage by which a party, working perfectly in conjunction, most quickly clears a given overall challenge, then that is the best choice for team play. It is simply a failure (or at least, lackluster aspect) of implementation that a skill that has no party synergy or is otherwise unengaging would most contribute to party success, not some fated flaw in concept. Whether is comes through a bank of skills shared between classes, among a role, or unique to a given class is irrelevant to that. One wants what's engaging, but will, FOR THE SAKE OF TEAM PLAY, pick what is optimal, even if dull.

[KisaiTenshi]

EDIT: This seems to be where we don't see eye to eye. Picking BiS skills and making best use of them through optimal gameplay is teamwork, technically. It might not feel particularly "together we stand", but if that is where design has placed the optimal advantage by which a party, working perfectly in conjunction, most quickly clears a given overall challenge, then that is the best choice for team play. It is simply a failure (or at least, lackluster aspect) of implementation that a skill that has no party synergy or is otherwise unengaging would most contribute to party success, not some fated flaw in concept. Whether is comes through a bank of skills shared between classes, among a role, or unique to a given class is irrelevant to that. One wants what's engaging, but will, FOR THE SAKE OF TEAM PLAY, pick what is optimal, even if dull.

This is the problem with everyone picking Cleric Stance in the healer role. You get screamed at, shouted down, and basically told you're a bad player if you don't have it, because maybe you wanted something else with more utility. If you don't follow the BiS guide for best rotation from some arbitrary wiki, good gawd you're a bad player, don't even play this game /s.

Yet the only cross-class skill that has ever felt necessary on healers is Swiftcast (and even then, just to avoid cast times of StoneSkin II and Revive.) That remains in the role system. Ruin, Psysick, Virus, Blizzard II, all gone. As Conjurer, you also lose Convalescence, Provoke, Awareness, Featherfoot, Second Wind, Internal Release, Mantra, Foresight Bloodbath, Mercy Stroke, Keen Flurry, Invigorate, Blood for Blood, Raging Strikes, Hawk's Eye, and Quelling Strikes already when you switch to White Mage. This is why the class -> Job system is broken.

If you're playing SCH, you still keep the arcanist skillset. But can pull Cure, Aero, Protect, Raise and Stoneskin from Conjurer. Yet because Arcanist is a DPS and Scholar is a healer, you don't get to pull any of the other DPS job skills you do as Summoner. Yet why would you want to pull Cure and Raise from Conjurer when you already have Psysick and Resurrection from Arcanist? Why does Arcanist have these skills if they are a DPS?

See how this is a mess?
Class = Access to all the cross-class actions (most ending at level 34, and no passives), Nothing from Astrologian, Dark Knight or Machinist can be cross-classed, because they don't have a class.
Job = Access to only cross-class actions of Two Melee or two Caster types related to the class

In other games that have had cross-class systems, every class had some kind of wanted skill in the upper levels of that class that made leveling that class useful. So your character would have all the BiS skills from every class. That is going away.

What should be expected when the "class" system disappears at some point is that the arcanist storyline get's moved to Scholar, and they create a new storyline for Summoner to replaced the arcanist storyline. The storyline itself fits more with the Scholar theme. Then just to be fair to everyone Square-Enix will let everyone reset the Level 1-30 storyline on any class, and the most obvious change will be the replacement of the former class name with the job the entire time, and the "job stone" aspects just disappear entirely.

[Shurrikhan]

This is the problem with everyone picking Cleric Stance in the healer role. You get screamed at, shouted down, and basically told you're a bad player if you don't have it, because maybe you wanted something else with more utility. If you don't follow the BiS guide for best rotation from some arbitrary wiki, good gawd you're a bad player, don't even play this game.

Again, that is the result of imbalanced choices given what development has weighted, by accident or intention, highly (e.g. dps) or lowly. Just like no MMO ought to allow for the choice of an instant kill spell, as per your X-zone/Death example, ideally, nothing like Cleric Stance should stand as a "choice" when it is in fact not.

That said, the ~2% DPS contribution of the 4.0 Cleric Stance may well be such an option, so long as any other skill, e.g. Rescuing a laggy East-coast-er, would provide the same advantage to clear time. But you're damn right that people would scream at you for not taking an ability that more than doubles your combined output in typical fights. The "choice" just wasn't really a choice. That's imbalance.
It does not, however, condemn the idea of choice itself, provided they are actual choices.

That's just how anything multiplayer is. Either you take the options that are actually best in a fight, given the conditions of your team, or you're performing less than maximally. Why would that not be the case? Now, hopefully your group is only looking for results, and will at least be willing to let you see if you can perform within an acceptable margin of their expectations regardless of your choices, risking the time it may take to exchange them if you cannot. (But the more people fight the idea of providing informative tools, by which to determine results, the more is assumed, and the more options are trimmed even if your skill would otherwise make up for your choices, because while results should be all that matter, how else can one boost the probability of success with only roughly known contribution?)

Class IN THIS ITERATION = Access to all the cross-class actions. That does not have to be the exact case just because a game allows for, roughly, two tiers of classes—broad/primary and focused/advanced.
Jobs IN THIS ITERATION = Access to only two related classes. That does not have to be the exact case just because a game allows for, roughly, two tiers of classes—broad/primary and focused/advanced.


My ONLY point here has only ever been that XIV is a terrible example of a two-tier system... probably because it never intended anything beyond the makeshift.
Its slipshod implementation is no representation of the concept's viability.

I am NOT saying that XIV would necessarily be improved by making classes an actual thing. Nor am I saying that XIV would be better without. Speaking in terms of enjoyment for the playerbase gained per dollar of development spent, making classes viable would not be a good path unless it was somehow the natural center for several other additions to the game experience. (That is incredibly unlikely.) But neither is there anything that starting as a Paladin from level 1, before one would have ever heard of the Paladin order or have any happenstance to connect them to it, would provide that simply forcing someone to get the job to continue on to level 31 could not. Except of course to consume money.

[KisaiTenshi]

Reminder, don't clip /s , by clipping it, you changed the tone from sarcasm to serious. I was certainly being sarcastic with the part you quoted.

Again, that is the result of imbalanced choices given what development has weighted, by accident or intention, highly (e.g. dps) or lowly. Just like no MMO ought to allow for the choice of an instant kill spell, as per your X-zone/Death example, ideally, nothing like Cleric Stance should stand as a "choice" when it is in fact not.

That said, the ~2% DPS contribution of the 4.0 Cleric Stance may well be such an option, so long as any other skill, e.g. Rescuing a laggy East-coast-er, would provide the same advantage to clear.

See this is what I pointed out. Why was Cleric Stance EVER a cross-class choice in the first place? Most of the cross-class skills come from Conjurer's list, but there is nothing from Scholar (E4E from Arcanist) and nothing at all from Astrologian. Hence the White Mage is alone in not having anything of any real use that can be pulled from another class.

But both Scholar and Astrologian want to pull Protect and Cleric stance. See the un-even problem?

This is why people feel that WHM is getting the short end of the stick, because we lose are most useful skills into the role system, that we never had to take from cross-class, and these other healer jobs lose nothing to cross-class. Sure Esuna is not Leeches, but if you've ever been level-synced as Scholar in a dungeon to below level 30, you had only the fairy to do everything except psysick. Obviously some of these changes are meant to fix imbalances like that. But why pick on WHM? Could SE have simply made Stone Skin, Protect and Esuna exclusive to WHM? Well then the other healers wouldn't have access to protect, and since it's needed all the way at level 16, something would have to be lost on AST and SCH. AST and SCH are only available at level 30.

So while I agree in principal that yes maybe these skills are needed by all healers, thus they should have been part of their skillset, it seems like these are all going to need to be changed when they drop the class system, and that likely means that Scholar loses it's entire arcanist toolkit at that point in time in favor of duplicating skills that AST and WHM already have. Maybe at that point WHM can get back some of it's skills it lost, and the levels change for Scholar's existing skills so they can be accessed at the same level as WHM.

[Shurrikhan]

Snip

Our conversation still isn't getting across.

I will repeat: the cross-class system failed to give a modicum of balance to the potential choices, not because the skills came from other classes, and certainly not because of any division between classes and jobs (the distinction of which is also arbitrary, based only on SE's intended or neglected designs), but simply because no meaningful balance was ever attempted. Classes remained only because Yoshida hadn't yet phased them out, and lore and common sense made starting as an allegedly advanced and insular sect of a particular discipline difficult; none of the mechanics linking them to their jobs was ever given a long view of interaction.

To repeat from the beginning, as shortly as possible: I get annoyed when people use XIV as an example of broad classes being, at least for some significant portion of time alongside competitors, an option, as flawed. The concept has never been meaningfully touched on in this game. So how could one possibly prove or refute its viability through XIV alone?

I am not arguing whether cross-class or role-shared skills are better systems. The first is some kind of terd, and the other a shriveled orange that unfortunately comes with a side of mold (unnecessary native or job-adaptive pruning). Neither is relevant to my first post here, which was imply to say that "done right, classes -> jobs makes a lot of sense," and that treating one implementation as all-pervasive conceptual proof is foolish.

[Felis]

See this is what I pointed out. Why was Cleric Stance EVER a cross-class choice in the first place? Most of the cross-class skills come from Conjurer's list, but there is nothing from Scholar (E4E from Arcanist) and nothing at all from Astrologian. Hence the White Mage is alone in not having anything of any real use that can be pulled from another class.

But both Scholar and Astrologian want to pull Protect and Cleric stance. See the un-even problem?

Because Cleric Stance switch mind with int. And without int no healer can do enough dmg for solo quests until in 2 weeks.