Quote Originally Posted by Kazrah View Post
I think it would be worse, and it's definitely important to find that balance between every job in a role looking alike and the class-based cluster#@$& that was FFXI.

Take the shapeshifter job in my forum sig (I know, shameless plug, but needed a crafted example). I knew every tank job in this game followed a template of what skills and abilities they learned at certain levels, and I mapped out that template to make that shapeshifter while trying to provide some sort of deviation through the wild card spots in the tank template to make the job unique. Whether such a concept could work or not is another story, but the skills and abilities listed in it follow the same leveling path as every other tank.

Trying to keep jobs simple yet diversified is tough task, and something I think devs have to grapple with everyday for both current and future jobs.
Very true. I'd just wager that the present trajectory will likely fetter the game's potential designs in the long run, sacrificing job identity and the available variety of encounters if it continues as is. "Role" has had a bit too strong a grip on design, to the point that future jobs feel like they're likely just to feel like faint redistributions or outright carbon copies.

It feels like there are just too many unnecessary design constraints assumed necessary. A lot of them have since shed their weight in precedent, such as by classes/jobs no longer necessarily having an equal amount of skill keys or skills, but the way we acquire skills are unchanged, or the fact that skills are always given in an assigned order or solely through quests or levels. Take your Blue Mage ideas, for instance. You've clearly put effort into matching its previously unique form of skill acquisition into XIV's system by giving them a assigned order and timings, but why should that be necessary? It will almost certainly be a "hero class", one impossible to level without having first reached the level at which one starts its expansion on another class. It can afford inefficiencies or overefficiencies over particular levels. (And it's not as if the current classes aren't already imbalanced over various level spreads before reaching level cap.) Why should it be limited to only x abilities ever learnable, rather than x usable at a time from a more traditionally (i.e. larger) sized bank of abilities? Such would necessarily disallow a would-be hybrid from ever having a satisfyingly full and cohesive toolkit for any role or mix thereof, whatever it may be.