Quote Originally Posted by Mikey_R View Post
You also completely skipped over my first post which tells you there are alot more hoops to jump through than just sticking a new weapon on a job and calling it a day. There is alot of work that goes into making a job and really, their time would be better spent making a new job with it's own identity, rather than being say, Warrior but damage, or Dancer but healing.
I'm not skipping it over. What my post is saying is that some of the substantial hoops actually would be easily overcome by such a repurposing. They won't need to create new weapon templates/hitboxes. They won't need to create new armor templates or categories. They would have a basic moveset to level 30 to develop in a different direction (cutting somewhere downwards of a third of moveset development). And they could likely reuse a fair number of animations, or otherwise tweak them a bit.

Yes, there is a lot of work that goes into making a wholly unique job, but that is not what I am advocating for because unique jobs are becoming increasingly more development-heavy with (ymmv) decreasing returns. I would rather the devs inject new life into the base ARR jobs than kill themselves trying to develop new classes from scratch with a level 1-100 ability progression, on top of figuring out how to, yet again, add another 10 levels of complexity to classes which have already undergone tiered evolution 1, 2, 3, 4 times.

And even if they have it in them to make 2-ish more jobs at level 100, I would still be advocating for this to extend the lifespan of the game two years from now. If not right now, at some point the cost-benefit of eeking out new archetype niches versus building out already great classes is going to shift.

I'm not saying this is the only direction they can/should take the game, but I am saying that it would be a logical and totally reasonable move to make. At least as long as classes still exist. It's not like we have many solid options left for jobs, as Reaper and especially Sage demonstrate.I don't see a mystic or rune knight happening as long as we have RDM and BLU (given that elemental affinities aren't a thing in this game). Chemists already exist in the game as alchemists and honestly make more sense in that form because mixing and throwing crap on the battlefield does not fit well with XIV's distinction between combat and crafting classes. Beastmaster would likely be a limited job. Corsairs are a GC aesthetic accessible to any job.

With changes to AST and WHM I can see us possibly creating a niche for geomancers or chronomancers, so there's still *some* classic design space, but it's not much. I really like what the devs have managed to put out, but it can't last forever and it seems like we are approaching the end of good, original job design.