Quote Originally Posted by YukikoKurosawa View Post
I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards. Though, could this be like the Paladin class fantasy problem (They're just Gladiators with holy-themed abilities) where it's simply an issue of Japan not having or understand the concept of a Bard because it's a western thing like Paladin? By that I mean they fundamentally did not understand what constitutes a "Bard" and thought making a bowman who also plays music made sense. Sad that thanks to the way jobs are designed we'll never get a proper bowman class because we can't have two classes who use the same weapon.
It's not an issue of Japan not understanding the difference. For many reasons, but it also is demonstrably not the case when XI clearly knew the difference between a ranger and a bard.

It's an issue of archer being a pretty boring job concept without any additional gimmicks. In a game where every other job has some sort of magical element on top of a weapon style, the "archer job" needed something like songs or an animal companion on top of it so as not to be totally underwhelming. Obviously they went with melding archer with bard rather than beastmaster, probably because it had better overall synergy and didn't trod too much on the companion system's toes. I also suspect a huge justification for it was because XIV is a more dynamic, weapon- and attack-focused game than XI, and they needed to give bard *some* sort of actual weapon. Either way, I think it was the right choice because I consider "harp-bows" to be perhaps one of the most innovative takes on classic FF jobs in the entire game (alongside AST and SGE).

I wouldn't have looked twice at a boring ranger bow job, frankly, and I don't know why people keep pushing for that idea without proposing something more to actually make the concept, yaknow, interesting. Something that exceeds just using a weapon and moves into fantasy heroism. Even warrior, perhaps the most "basic" job design in XIV, has some elements of berserker and geomancer in it to give it some additional magical flavor and better carve out a job fantasy niche. A bow-wielder by itself is not much of a job fantasy.