Jobs: unconnected and now feeling flat

[Vhailor]

But it doesn't have to be that. However I again strongly feel that we should have some form of interaction between various jobs correlating to our experience spent in them. That without it, it all just feels much flatter then what we had before.

It is flatter, yeah. SE over-reacted. There were a few egregiously necessary abilities (Cleric's Stance wasn't one of them; Provoke was, and arguably Swiftcast) that required other jobs be leveled, with absolutely nothing to indicate they were required, nor any in-game system pushing the player to level related jobs (beyond the not-high-enough level 15 requirement for Job quests). Rather than provide more tutorials / guidance, or rework these few abilities, SE just nuked the entire system.

That said, XIV's entire Job system always felt like a huge step backward from FFXI, and I can't say that the system ever had much depth. I'd love to see a level of connectedness (re)introduced, but I'm not holding my breath. SE seems loathe to place peripheral requirements on players, and the community will naturally ensure that any meaningful bonus effectively becomes a requirement. So... we get a flat system.

Who cares if they're perfectly balanced? Perfect balance is the enemy of variety, and variety is equally essential to any successful MMO. I mean, we already have a litany of requirements for running Savage / Ultimate content; you need a semi-optimal party setup, you need top-end gear, you need to have internet that doesn't flicker very often, you need to be able to flawlessly execute mechanics. Are you seriously suggesting that the players who sink hours and hours of effort into Savage / Ultimate, or the players who spend countless tens of hours farming Relics for that matter, would freak out if they also had to get a pair of DD to a whopping level 35 or 40?

Look at FFXI - Ninja was a required subjob for Warriors. It just was. But the game didn't suffer because of that; people learned, saw what others were doing, and went out and leveled it. Worst-case, they viewed it as a chore, and their efforts essentially donated tanks for low-level parties; best-case, they found a job they liked, that they might want to main instead. But then for other content, they still had choices; maybe they were baby-sitting a friend in a lowbie party, and subbed WHM for Raise. Maybe they were fighting an enemy that hit rapidly for lower damage, and opted for MNK so they could Counter it to death. Were these choices mainstream options for end-game content? Usually not - but choice was nevertheless present.

We shouldn't be so scared of imbalance. It'll always exist, and homogeneity is an equally dire threat to FFXIV.