Quote Originally Posted by Kraniel View Post
I really think it's a shame, because FFXIV allows you to play every class on the same character. This model is pretty convenient for MMOs where you have to adapt your party roster depending on the content you're going for.
"Oh, we need strong heals for this one ? Sure, i'll switch to WHM", is what i wish i was saying instead of "Darn, i can't join as AST because there's already one in the party ? Well it's ok i'll just switch to WHM, it's the same anyway lol"
But even if the game lets you swap jobs with minimal friction, it still won't give you all of them at max level for free. There is still the time sink to max level that costs something to the user.

I think you are absolutely right about the reasons why the game is like now, and I would go further and say that it had to be this way, interchangeable jobs within a role is the progress the game had to go into. The only other alternative would be NO NEW JOBS IN THE GAME, not after Heavensward atleast. I can kinda imagine a FFXIV where DRK, MCH and AST were the very last jobs added to the game forever. Then you weave heavy interdependencies between all the jobs and maybe bump raid party sizes to 3 tanks, 3 healers and 6 dps. Maybe in this timeline Ninja also never existed so now you can fit all jobs in the game into the savage raid!

So we can go mad. White Mage is the only healer who can actually heal raid wides, but the party will not even survive if there was no preemptive succor and of course AST has a party wide damage reduction card to play to combine with it. We can force all jobs to a single niche that they do till the end of time, nothing will change, we got the game solved. I hope SCH and WHM players enjoy running out of mana in dungeons when they are alone because we tuned all MP usage based on BRD and AST mana recovery utility.

And expansions will truly have more hype than before when they can never include new jobs because there is no design space to add new roles and the whole raiding breaks the moment something comes along and disrupts the formula. Dip the game into amber, let it set, put it into a museum.

But anyway, make Gravity, Holy and Art of War very expensive and do tons of damage, like quadruple the potency number and put a 3-5 second cast time on them. If you want to add DPS options to healers, I want people to name one or two actions from each job that they first remove so there is room for replacement, if you ask for black mage action set to be attached to white mage whole hog, you are not to be taken seriously.