A talent system

[Belhi]

Couldn't we say the same thing about AST, but with a different name.

I mean really, you're going to have different shades of the same mechanics via a greater number of jobs, or you have different shades of the same mechanics across different specs of fewer jobs. If the latter idea is so misguided, then similarly why have new jobs, even? Customization is customization. How closely it clusters to prior motifs or mechanics, or how packaged the differences are in order to prevent perfect choice (the paradoxical enemy of balanced spread of choices), makes far more of a difference than whether the additions are called "specs" or "aspects" or "mutations" or "sub-classes" or simple "new jobs".

While WHM and AST and for that matter BRD and MCH played quite similarly they are quite different Jobs now. Infact the comparison is pretty apt. In both cases, while both sets of jobs hold similarities due to holding similar roles but their gameplay is quite different.

Yoshi P shot down specs because the time it takes to add, adjust and balance additional specs is such that it makes more sense just to add more Jobs. At least in the case of Jobs its far easier to provide distinct themes and Job mechanics since you don't have overlap. After all, just look at the issues with SMN/SCH. That is the closest we have to a class with specs and people want the two separated.

[Shurrikhan]

While WHM and AST and for that matter BRD and MCH played quite similarly they are quite different Jobs now. Infact the comparison is pretty apt. In both cases, while both sets of jobs hold similarities due to holding similar roles but their gameplay is quite different.

Yoshi P shot down specs because the time it takes to add, adjust and balance additional specs is such that it makes more sense just to add more Jobs. At least in the case of Jobs its far easier to provide distinct themes and Job mechanics since you don't have overlap. After all, just look at the issues with SMN/SCH. That is the closest we have to a class with specs and people want the two separated.

I'll agree with all but that example parading as anecdotal evidence. Pointing at SMN/SCH as a reason why specs don't work is about as apt as saying a wallet won't work because it doesn't hold money when you don't put it in the pocket. There was no need to link their experience, no reason they couldn't add job traits to differentiate how the skills work between the two jobs, no reason they couldn't give separate bonus stat allotments. Every single thing that was complained about the SMN/SCH duality wasn't due to their simply having stemmed from a shared 1-30 experience. It was all of the most basic of basic decisions thereafter.

Let's go ahead and look at some other shared class ideas others, albeit not as numerous as the "split SCH/SMN" outcry that followed the pitiful excuses to particular balancing concerns and the consumptive need for Tomes of the Keeper, e.g. Thief or Assassin from Rogue. Some considered Mug too tangential and underdeveloped to feel appropriate on NIN. Their response: move it to a new job and build around it in order to create a new synergist/saboteur in the form of Thief. The same was often said of poisons, which amounted to no more than Job Action I and II traits. Rather than suggesting they be removed outright, others suggested they become a core concept for a new Assassin. Daggers and the core skills would still be appropriate for all three, but now you manage to flesh out and center previously tacked-on components.

Or let's take another idea: adaptations, wherein just a few core skills can be modified in order to change up the way rotations and very particular mechanics work for a job. No huge aesthetic effect, but you potentially take something that may have previously turned them off to the job and changed it instead into a raison de jouer. The time (or really, understanding) necessary for balance is an understandable concern there, but I'd find it hard to see how enlarging the strike zone in such a manner would be inherently less efficient than making an entirely new job, all its animation, lore, and quests, from scratch, or could even that it could be obviously replaced by that procedure.