Are jobs bound by lore?

[Cilia]

Remember that the Job system only really limits the PC because they're using Soul Crystals to basically cheat their way into skill.

With enough training and/or talent it'd be entirely plausible to transcend the Job system. Without spoiling too much Thancred later changes to a Gunbreaker, but retains some stealth tricks he employs during a climactic confrontation with Shadowbringers' secondary antagonist. Of course, animations limit every Job, and given Jobs are all animated with a specific weapon in mind...

[MikkoAkure]

Remember that the Job system only really limits the PC because they're using Soul Crystals to basically cheat their way into skill.

With enough training and/or talent it'd be entirely plausible to transcend the Job system. Without spoiling too much Thancred later changes to a Gunbreaker, but retains some stealth tricks he employs during a climactic confrontation with Shadowbringers' secondary antagonist. Of course, animations limit every Job, and given Jobs are all animated with a specific weapon in mind...

Pre-Stormblood, we had access to abilities from other classes too. A lot of the abilities some jobs have are more from the class than the job itself and that some of the ancient jobs would have been radically different in their day. Remember that for the original jobs in the game, you need to play as a class for 30 levels and those abilities don't go away as soon as you pick up a job stone.


Pre-Endwalker SMN seems like it borrows a lot of its rotation from its origination class, arcanist, as does SCH. Arcanists are a newer profession invented by the lalafell from their homeland in the Southern Isles, so it probably doesn't have a direct connection to Allag, but could still have some connection to Nym. Either way, EW SMN could be a return to form if the Allagan summoners weren't DoT mages like they are now.

Amdapor didn't have the same connection to the elementals like Gridania does, which means WHMs might not have been casting stone and aero in the old times, while a Gridanian-trained conjurer-turned-white mage would.

[RyuDragnier]

Remember that the Job system only really limits the PC because they're using Soul Crystals to basically cheat their way into skill.

I wouldn't say cheat. A lot of our progress in the jobs is already set in stone (ha!) by the time we get them, via lore reasons. Why does RDM start at 50? Because canonically the WoL has already leveled WHM and BLM (remember, all job quests are assumed done by the storyline when the X.1 patch kicks in), giving them large amounts of experience using both types of magic, and has leveled up multiple dexterous jobs giving them the basics they need to perform the acrobatics of the job well. By the end of the 2nd batch of job questlines, the WoL has already begun creating new moves. While the job stones give us the memories of the basics, we already have enough skill by that point to master them incredibly fast and then improve upon them.

[MrThinker]

I wouldn't say cheat. A lot of our progress in the jobs is already set in stone (ha!) by the time we get them, via lore reasons. Why does RDM start at 50? Because canonically the WoL has already leveled WHM and BLM (remember, all job quests are assumed done by the storyline when the X.1 patch kicks in), giving them large amounts of experience using both types of magic, and has leveled up multiple dexterous jobs giving them the basics they need to perform the acrobatics of the job well. By the end of the 2nd batch of job questlines, the WoL has already begun creating new moves. While the job stones give us the memories of the basics, we already have enough skill by that point to master them incredibly fast and then improve upon them.

Examples of our own moves include: Battle Litany (Dragoon), Living Shadow (Dark Knight), Dreadwyrm Trance (Summoner, we didn't learn this through the usual method, we had to go through a whole process to master it), Automaton Queen (Machinist) and every ability we learn through levelling rather than via job quests.