A Skillbook for all Jobs (idea)

[Recon1o6]

If I'm understanding this correctly, then what your proposal is

A job has a number of core skills and some slots.
A job then gets optional ones to slot in as they do things in the game.


Guess what? Fun>balance always. I support this. I miss cross class, but I also miss the many skills gutted over the years just as much. Despite what other people in this thread have said, ff14 IS a game about pressing the right buttons as you need because that's literally the point. If savage balance is an issue then just stop it from working in savage as an additional challenge aspect.

Unlocking these additional skills would incentivise running otherwise dead content and give horizontal progression that the playerbase keeps grumbling about.

Its not a stretch to make core skills include essentials like provoke then allow the custom slots to be filled with what the player desires their jobs to play like.

[Brightamethyst]

Guess what? Fun>balance always.

Ina single player game, yes. In a multi-player game, especially a massively multi-player game, no.

In a multi-player setting it can't just be fun. It has to be fun for everyone at the same time. Balance is king.

[Anhra]

Ina single player game, yes. In a multi-player game, especially a massively multi-player game, no.

In a multi-player setting it can't just be fun. It has to be fun for everyone at the same time. Balance is king.

We have balance oozing out of every corner of Eorzea, we desperately need some fun mechanics outside of Blue Mage.

[DrWho2010]

We have balance oozing out of every corner of Eorzea, we desperately need some fun mechanics outside of Blue Mage.

Lost Actions in Bozja/Delubrum?

[HyoMinPark]

Guess what? Fun>balance always. I support this. I miss cross class, but I also miss the many skills gutted over the years just as much. Despite what other people in this thread have said, ff14 IS a game about pressing the right buttons as you need because that's literally the point. If savage balance is an issue then just stop it from working in savage as an additional challenge aspect.

The issue with the cross-class system was that key skills were locked behind it. Like Provoke and leveling GLA to level 22. Or Swiftcast behind level 26 THM. SCH having to cross-class Protect and Stoneskin from CNJ/WHM, etc.. There is absolutely no reason to have skills that are essential to your role locked behind leveling up another class—perhaps one that you may not even be interested in. So while they may have been fun, it wasn’t fun for the players in content that got DRKs or WARs that hadn’t leveled their GLA to 22 for that skill. That’s why it was revamped into the role actions.

However, there were a lot of skills in said role actions that were never optional under any means: Provoke, Rampart, Reprisal, Shirk, Protect, Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast, Esuna (to a lesser extent in high-end since you can’t cleanse debuffs in there usually, but in other content, it’s good to have), Largesse, Refresh, Tactician, Palisade, Diversion. None of these skills were optional for jobs to have—and this could very well be a problem in the proposed system. Even with your core skills, if there are “optional” ones that are deemed necessary to your job/role, then they are no longer “optional” to have when it comes to group content. Failure to have them would lead to people being removed from parties because the rest of the group doesn’t want to deal with a player who is only bringing the absolute bare minimum to the group. That wouldn’t bring any fun to the game.

As I said before, had FFXIV been designed this way from the ground up, perhaps it would have worked. But this has never been the way combat has worked in this game. Any attempts at “optional” skills have backfired. Revamping combat into this would not help the game in any way, in my opinion.

We have balance oozing out of every corner of Eorzea, we desperately need some fun mechanics outside of Blue Mage.

There’s actually plenty of things in this game that could still stand to be balanced. Have you seen the physical ranged?

[ForteNightshade]

Its not a stretch to make core skills include essentials like provoke then allow the custom slots to be filled with what the player desires their jobs to play like.

Except then you run into the scenario WoW has, where jobs are flat out refused to be taken even in the casual content. Why? Because they're straight up inferior in every way. Let's say they allowed DRK to play as a DPS but it could never obtain the damage levels of any Melee DPS. It's worthless. There's literally no reason to bring it, thus you'll see PF for EX Primals and such locking it out because, again, why bring a job that's significantly weaker? If you argue to simply balance it better with the melee... you've just created a whole new workload for the dev team. This sort of idea works in Bozja/Eureka because they can throw silly actions at you in a singular controlled environment. It wouldn't work in the base game.

With that said, I do agree they went a little too far in the balance department if only because they opted for homogenization. Which, frankly, is lazy balancing. But going the opposite extreme isn't any better.