I Miss Cross-Class Skills

[Shurrikhan]

In that case, name ONE game with this type of system where the systems implementation isn't either broken or worthless due to one "spec" being better than the rest? If no ones been able to do it, its not an implementation issue, its a systemic one.

Cross class never would have worked properly. If you give all jobs access to all skills, it becomes a mess. If you limit them to certain skills and they are beneficial, those become required (which, funnily enough, role skills is where all the mandatory skills went. Huh)

No one else has even attempted it. No other game packages all professions into a single character via an Armory system as we did, but the fatalistic 'illusion of choice' end you're convinced of occurs in every game with more than a single class, weapon, or armor set, let alone additional customization.

Why should there be multiple i370s for a single slot? Nevermind progression, surely they are just illusion of choice! Why are there more dps than just MNK, BLM, DRG, and -- when LB is too important -- sometimes SAM? Illusion of choice!

Not since all jobs shared the same character progression system and one was far more systematically encouraged to multi-class have all jobs (classes, at the time) had access to all skills. You're strawmanning.

Yes, they were certain skills and they were required. But, you know what else is required? Getting your job to max level. Why should having a bit more experience required to fully level each job in exchange for the Armory Bonus be so fundamentally wrong for a game which, on the whole, encourages you to play all jobs on a single character and even largely sells itself on that feature? Why would further systemically encouraging players to have one and only one job per character be superior? Because that's all the difference is: we were specifically given the Armory Bonus to facilitate multi-leveling because it was so integral to the game back then, likely maintaining the same time to a well-equipped character but granting previews of other classes in the process as to give a more varied and integral progression experience. Without that goal, you do not need facilitators like, say, the Armory Bonus. Here the Armory Bonus isn't the infant we ought not chuck with out with the bathwater -- it is the bathwater. And with neither the goal for multi-leveling nor its facilitators, you've effectively left a core and iconic feature of the game dead on arrival, all because you'd rather take the same, or very nearly the same, time to level your job to max as level it to max and grab useful actions from elsewhere in the process.

Now, I'll argue that Cross-class shouldn't have been Additional Abilities, but instead core mechanical traits or adaptations that varied what the borrowing class was capable of. In such a case, they wouldn't be required in the contexts that a given job was already innately a good fit for, but it would allow for a sense of combined progression and open up options for new jobs, adding a sense of cohesion and groundedness to one's character growth. Additional Abilities, I do think, weren't the best of ideas. But cross-classing? No. I don't see anything superior about every job being entirely separate from every other job in a game that centrally features the idea of all jobs on one character.