Quote Originally Posted by MartaDemireux View Post
I totally agree that they made a mistake in merging the two together. And I totally agree they should work toward separating them. However, I feel like the amount of work involved would be a major hindrance.

An idea I've thrown around over at Reddit would be a job glamour of sorts - toggle with a command like /jobglamour BRD or /jobglamour RNG. This would keep the gameplay exactly the same between BRD and RNG and just change the look of the abilities. So, BRD gets all sorts of song animations while RNG gets arrow animations. The 3 song stance rotation could turn into 3 different poisons. The Animals command from FFV could make a reappearance of sorts for some of the support abilities. They could even skip commands and make a Harp weapon to change to BRD glamours, having it function similarly to ACN jobs while not having to worry about balancing a new job.

This would considerably lessen the workload for a sooner implementation and could even be a stepping stone for total separation.
Honestly, the only real work it would take is just making 1 new job for the most part, so it's really not unreasonable for a 6.0 scenario.

Ranger as a concept is essentially the same as the current Bard, just with new names and animations for Bard's current song abilities, which is only a fraction of the overall kit anyway. All you're changing is Mage's Ballad, Army's Paeon, Warden's Paeon, Wonderer's Minuet, Nature's Minne, Battle Voice, and Troubadour i.e. 7 abilities, which is less work than the Machinist rework since those abilities can still function identically. The only other thing would be creating a new set of job quests from level 30+ which is a bit more work than is put into a typical new job per expansion, but not alarmingly so.

New Bard is essentially just one of the new jobs, except it would start at level 30 and would just inherit the current Bard job quest line, so the only change would be to the NPC weapons associated with the Bard Quest Line, and whatever new Job quests got added.

So basically: 1 New Job by design, 1 new Job Quest Line. Not that much more work than adding in any other new job.