I think I want subjobs more than I want job balance.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Guild wars 2 is a shitty space type game with aline races lol

But incorrect customization and creativity defines fun in games

There a reason y d2 is still the best game and its cuz the customization lets you design how you play.. Requiring brains for alot of builds and thought

Poe is also extremely fun/godly bevause of it

Uhhh..

You are talking about wildstar...

[Seraphor]

I think it would be cool to be able to 'sub' a job so that you'd gain one signature skill from that job, that can be used in the overworld or if undersized only.
However, seeing as you can swap jobs instantly, I can see why they'd think this wasn't a pressing matter.

[MikkoAkure]

Guild wars 2 is a shitty space type game with aline races lol

But incorrect customization and creativity defines fun in games

There a reason y d2 is still the best game and its cuz the customization lets you design how you play.. Requiring brains for alot of builds and thought

Poe is also extremely fun/godly bevause of it

Yeah I think you got your games mixed up. GW2 is a fantasy MMORPG with humans, taller viking humans, cat people, goblin people, and plant people as races.

Sub-jobs and customization are fun in games where they are designed around that. FFXIV is not one of those games. In a game where the gameplay revolves around combos and rotations, there is no room at all for throwing another jobs abilities into the mix. All of the abilities have cooldowns designed to line up with other abilities/cooldowns. I've still yet to see a single person explain why this would make sense and be fun in the context of FFXIV without mentioning other games. It just seems like everyone wants FFXIV to be like "X" or "Y" and they just say "Oh, I liked this game and it had customization and customizing is fun" without providing the actual context of how this would be fun in FFXIV without ripping the existing gameplay out and starting over.

That said, I didn't mind the system where we got to use abilities from other classes. But I've always had everything leveled up and I can see where it would be annoying for new players to have to level a class they don't like in order to get abilities they need to use.

[MaxwellPower]

What would sub-jobs even accomplish? OP just says that they miss sub-jobs from XI and that they bring more customization. But to what end? If Yoshi-P added sub-jobs, how in any way does that make the game more fun? If you are suddenly able to use the abilities of say a monk half your level, how would that benefit you in any way, shape, or form? It's not even about balance or The Meta, you would just be adding unnecessary clunk for the sake of "customization". In order for sub-jobs to begin to make sense, you would first need to strip away the combo system the game has, and then readjust all content around that and then end result won't be FFXIV anymore.

Another thing is that more customization and creativity doesn't necessarily mean more fun. Guild Wars 2 tried to get rid of the "holy trinity" of tank, healer, DPS. While leveling up to cap was the most fun leveling experience I've had in an MMO, when I got to the dungeons it just felt like a free-for-all. There was no strategy. I quit shortly after that, especially since FFXIV came back after the wait in between 1.0 and 2.0, so I don't know if it got better, but the experience showed me that ideas don't necessarily end up end up as good as they sounded on paper.

You are right that just adding subjobs wouldn't automatically make it more fun, they would have to come up with a good design to make it fun. But for a lot of people, character customization is one of the most fun aspects of a lot of RPG games(especially in the FF series) and FFXIV kind of lacks in that respect right now.

I have had a lot of fun in other RPGs/MMOs by running content that would otherwise be pretty boring to play multiple times, like dungeons in FFXIV often are right now, by trying out different builds.

[MaxwellPower]

Yeah I think you got your games mixed up. GW2 is a fantasy MMORPG with humans, taller viking humans, cat people, goblin people, and plant people as races.

Sub-jobs and customization are fun in games where they are designed around that. FFXIV is not one of those games. In a game where the gameplay revolves around combos and rotations, there is no room at all for throwing another jobs abilities into the mix. All of the abilities have cooldowns designed to line up with other abilities/cooldowns. I've still yet to see a single person explain why this would make sense and be fun in the context of FFXIV without mentioning other games. It just seems like everyone wants FFXIV to be like "X" or "Y" and they just say "Oh, I liked this game and it had customization and customizing is fun" without providing the actual context of how this would be fun in FFXIV without ripping the existing gameplay out and starting over.

That said, I didn't mind the system where we got to use abilities from other classes. But I've always had everything leveled up and I can see where it would be annoying for new players to have to level a class they don't like in order to get abilities they need to use.

I enjoyed the cross class skill system in 2.x, but it did have it's flaws. Maybe they could have expanded upon it in the opposite direction than they did when they moved to role skills.
The main problem with cross class skills was that most of the skills were either useless or required, so like you would have WAR who would need to level GLD just to get the skills it needed to tank effectively, which as you mentioned, was annoying if you had no interest playing gld.
But, for example, I thought getting stone skin on PLD was pretty cool, it wasn't useless or required, and I leveled CNJ specifically for that and it was fun to get rewarded for that, but I didn't feel I had to do it to play PLD effectively.

So if they returned to something like that, but had more useful but not required utility skills like that, it could be pretty fun. Maybe they could do things like certain combinations of cross class skills would be really strong, but it would be balanced by having the limited number of cross class slots.
If it causes too many balance problems in savage or ultimate, than they could just force a preset set of skills in that content.

I'm not saying they should do this, but just an idea of how it could fit into FFXIV.

[StormyFae]

Yeah I think you got your games mixed up. GW2 is a fantasy MMORPG with humans, taller viking humans, cat people, goblin people, and plant people as races.

Sub-jobs and customization are fun in games where they are designed around that. FFXIV is not one of those games. In a game where the gameplay revolves around combos and rotations, there is no room at all for throwing another jobs abilities into the mix. All of the abilities have cooldowns designed to line up with other abilities/cooldowns. I've still yet to see a single person explain why this would make sense and be fun in the context of FFXIV without mentioning other games. It just seems like everyone wants FFXIV to be like "X" or "Y" and they just say "Oh, I liked this game and it had customization and customizing is fun" without providing the actual context of how this would be fun in FFXIV without ripping the existing gameplay out and starting over.

That said, I didn't mind the system where we got to use abilities fromer classes. But I've always had everything leveled up and I can see where it would be annoying for new players to have to level a class they don't like in order to get abilities they need to use.

Cat ppl have 2 tails so aline, plants are basicly farscape alines, the "goblins" are more like grays and humans are meha so nop.. Customization could be so small as to rechoice how ur combo works

For example fuse blm with drk could reshape ur combo with magic to void thunder for what fire does then void fire to recover mp and void blizzard to frostbite dot. Or with smn to grant bile thunder,bliz,fire or anicent fire bliz thunder

Sub jobs could be used to change how our combos work and what theme they use like pally,drk could grant pally void knight type combo themes.
Archer/blm could grant elemental arrows while archer,whm could be more support with arrows that recover ppl upon hitting there mark

Example holy spirt now becomes void crystal does the same but is drawing upon void in theme andhas different animation

[Saidosha]

Subjobs are one of those things, I'd argue, that have to be there from the game's launch with future ability additions planned around their presence. XIV is arguably past this point of implementation, with such an addition further justifying a complete revamp of all content to maintain a certain degree of balance. That may be happening soon with EW and the numbers squish, but I'd also argue that's an easier form of revamp since they're likely just going to be tweaking numbers downward with a % value based on tweaks within ilvl and not accommodating people suddenly having a bunch of abilities they didn't have before.

Of course, concerns over meta are also 100% valid. What if I'm a Red Mage that wants to be more melee oriented? Of the existing XIV jobs, what would you pick for that purpose? I don't see a whole lot of synergy in this regard, which further tells me that some jobs are going to be more flexible than others. What would be likely, just like in XI, is that RDMs would be forced to take up more WHM abilities and shift away from their presence as mediocre DPS to mediocre Healer. And sure, if that changed queue role attribution, some might even jump on that because lolDPSqueues, but it's a safe bet that everyone who wanted to play RDM as a DPS, even with more of a BLM focus, would have a harder time finding manually configured groups.

Having also played XI, I was probably one of the community's more notorious advocates for buffing RDM's melee game. The pervasive mantra was that they were supposed to be the jack of all trades, and my interpretation of that was always that with the right gear and sub, you could be a tank, healer, nuker, or meleer. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't look too far past the fallacy of that moniker because to them, getting an invite as a much sought healer role invalidated any other concerns for job identity and some even fell into the trap of thinking RDM was a better healer than WHMs when the answer was more It's Complicated(tm) depending on encounter(s) and party competency. Still, I lobbied pretty hard for improvements to the job's melee gear, traits, food options, spells/abilities, and so on. Irksomely enough, a lot of those ideas wound up manifesting in other jobs like BLU and SCH while RDM third-rate in most everything. Even RDM's implied niche in enfeebling was at odds with so many mobs being immune or being able to quickly shed a debuff, with many debuffs RDM never even natively getting access to. Probably the only other job to have a comparative identity crisis, albeit on a lesser scale, would've been DRK. It's melee game was good, but the caster side was pretty much garbage. No one would ever take a caster DRK for endgame activities, and for a damn good reason. This didn't have to be the case, but Tanaka was pretty much too stubborn or too much of a chicken to really embrace the potential of hybrid classes, while some players would feed into the paranoia that if they were good, no one would play anything else. RDM under Matsui is probably better off these days, but I'd say the implied mediocrity of the Jack role is still there.

[kaynide]

Guild wars 2 is a shitty space type game with aline races lol

Yeah I think you got your games mixed up. GW2 is a fantasy MMORPG with humans, taller viking humans, cat people, goblin people, and plant people as races.

Cat ppl have 2 tails so aline, plants are basicly farscape alines, the "goblins" are more like grays and humans are meha so nop..

..you're still not talking about GW2 though?