Which Job, in your opinion, has the biggest identity issue?

[vetch]

BLU is a bad one for identity. I lost all interest in it when it gave up its traditional playstyle of 'I do weird things with enemy stats and levels and can access enemy-only debuffs,' and moved to 'I dump a bunch of cooldowns inside a burst-window like other jobs except I get to use boss animations instead (they still just do regular damage)'.

Dancer. It's a dps class with buff/utility that has minor damage mitigation, minor healing, and minor buffs, none of which do enough to be a real hook.

It's probably an unpopular opinion but I'll second Dancer, because I find it to have no coherent class fantasy.

I've never been inspired to hit harder or to take less damage by knowing that someone is dancing kinda near me. I have been mesmerized by watching a dance. Indeed I feel like taking your eyes off the enemy to watch a dancer is what gets you killed. So I can't access 14!DNC's apparent class fantasy of 'my hot body and twirly movements will motivate my allies (who are supposed to be looking at the enemy and not me) to fight harder'.

In other FF games, my interpretation is the supported one -- Dances are largely about distracting and draining fighting ability from the enemies watching the Dancer, with a few big damage hits thrown in. Some games have healing abilities on Dancers, but in many of those, it's through blending with another job. Mog is a "Dancer" who mostly just uses Geomancy. Penelo is (eventually) a "Dancer" but uses White Magic. FFX-2 Songstresses are Dancers plus Bards, etc..

FF11 has the broadest definition, where Dancers can main- or co-heal, crowd control, buff, debuff, and do moderate DPS, all using their own Dance skillset without needing a sub-job.

So FF14's DNC could be said to be a successor to FF11's, except... by the time it came out we were well away from complex FF11-style job interactions and role flexing, so 14!DNC's heals are bad, its crowd control and debuffs (the main identity of other FF dancers!) are totally absent, and its trait of historically-middling DPS but great support had to be discarded to make the buff-stacking more predictable and bring its personal output closer to other DPS, because otherwise it'd be perma-locked from PF groups unless the group had a cracked selfish DPS to funnel to.

Were people so desperate for a new fake support in ShB that CBU3 just added +DPS buffs to Dancer to capture that attention and shipped it, class fantasy be damned? It doesn't land.

[ReynTime]

Bard was already mentioned a few times. I'll add AST because it plays NOTHING like its lore implied, and same goes for ACN and SCH since they're talked about in their quests as being all about "strategy" except ACN is the most simple job in the entire game and SCH lost actions that played more to its original fantasy.
DRK has almost nothing to do with Final Fantasy dark knight anymore. Its identity is now "the edgy tank".

- Squall is basically Rinoa's bodyguard (or... well, the knight to her sorceress, a recurring motif in FFVIII), so it's not that far-fetched.
- Gunbreaker weapons aren't meant to shoot bullets, instead they imbue the blade with various effects (consistent with FFVIII lore). That there are numerous actual GNB weapons in-game with seemingly functional barrels is... wrong, they shouldn't, yet they do.
- They do not use "Garlean" technology, not sure where you got that from? Gunbreakers supposedly predate the Garlean Empire by quite a bit, going as far back as the Allagan Empire... somehow...

What a stretch. Then I suppose rogue should be a tank since Zidane protects Garnet a lot more often than Steiner.

[Mikey_R]

You're talking about the Sultansworn, which is a specific subset of Paladins. In addition to them, there are also so-called "free Paladins" who don't answer to the Sultana, which is what the Warrior of Light is, as well as Solkzagyl.

The Sultsworn is the collective name for the Paladins. Free Paladins came after (way way after) the creation of the Sultsworn and whilst they do not answer (necessarily) to the Sultana, they still represent the Sultana in their actions. This is why they take it seriously when a Paladin starts to defy their ideals, as it is a smear not only on them, but the Sultana as well.

I didn't say they had a special connection with the light, just that they use it. And they clearly do, with their numerous attacks with the name Holy in them that do shiny light stuff.

No, but you said it was their identity, which should come from the game. The reasonings you gave for Warrior and Dark Knight both relate to the game so you at least agree there, but why do you suddenly deny that the game gives Paladin's no connection to light except for the WoL? No other Paladin's show any signs of using Light in anything, so this is a trait the WoL has picked up on their own, separate from the PLDs ingame.

That's the benefit of using a pre-existing archetype: you don't have to explain every last detail, because people already get it.

Because not every game is the same, a Paladin in one game is not a Paladin in another. Considering the fact Paladin, when translated from Japanese is Knight, you are just a knight who uses light, whereas in other games, Knight and Paladin can be 2 distinct classes. This is why is is important to look at the lore ingame.

Not only does that sound like a wet napkin of an identity, but you've just described something that the player never does as a Gunbreaker, at least not more than any other tank, and in my opinion not more than any healer either.

Whether you like it or not doesn't matter, that is what a Gunbreaker is. Go and talk to Radovan and find out for yourself. As for whether it fits, their purpose is to defend and disrupt by drawing attention to themselves as someone who is deadly enough to get through the Allagan's guns. They are going to be a higher priority and someone they want to eliminate quickly. That is literally the whole point of a tank. The quick attacks are represented by the cartridge attacks and Continuation.

So, why doesn't it have an identity? Because it is exactly the same reasoning that other tanks have, but for some reason you dismiss GNB for no reason.

[MikkoAkure]

BRD is the correct answer but I'm surprised to see people saying MCH.

The class is called "machinist", not "gunner". Most if not all of the machines the machinists are using were used by Edgar in FFVI (who was the first to be called machinist) so there's precedence anyway. I think it fits the class better than what we had before and is a step-up in both flavor and gameplay.

[Avoidy]

Join me in the black pill, brothers. The new smn, despite the reasons for its popularity boiling down to "it lets us bypass needing a caster dps", will be seen as a success and all future casters will follow its model. Maybe not blm, we'll see though.

This is basically what happened to healers ages ago. WHM got gutted, but when you ask the devs how people feel about it they just say it's a great success because it's the most popular healing job in the game. Forget the fact that it's the only healer you can play right out the starting gate. Forget the fact that "white mage" is like, an iconic FF job that everyone knows about. Forget about the fact that its spell names are just intuitive ("Cure, Cure2, Cure 3" instead of weird shit like benefic or adlo). No, no. The job must be popular because its kit puts people to sleep. Better apply that to all the healers so more people will want to heal, right? So now every expac they make ast a little worse and they gut SCH like a fish. And then SGE comes out and it's just more of the same.

Well anyway, now the DPS are starting to see it. SMN is really bare bones and railroaded, but it's one of the most popular jobs in the game right now. CBU3 only seems to care about engagement numbers (look at their interview about how the tome relics were a success because soooo many people got a relic) without actually looking at the context, so it's reasonable to assume that Dawntrail will be more boring dumbed down dps jobs that do 123 until a resource gauge hits 50 and then they hit 4(!!!) for a big spender with an animation that totally lacks impact and actually you want to save your gauge for your 1-2 minute burst(!!!) so you can maximize your gains but you'd better pray you crit!!! Only this time, it's pirate themed!

[VictorSpoils]

Actually that's one of them I would NOT list as having an identity problem at this point. The Endwalker changes gave it a very solid identity as an Final Fantasy Summoner that really is on target and fits the bill.
Uninteresting in terms of mechanics and complexity in comparison to how it USED to be... well that may be a fair point. Still at present they did nail the Summoner Identity down very well with the new changes.

Even the identity aspect still gets complaints. You're ultimately watching the same three colored nukes every minute, each of which deals the same damage. You still summon Egis until 90, which people complained about before EW, and they still want the other three elemental primals to be included in the kit, which seems like a pipe dream by now. Not even the 2D FF games had summons as banal and lacking in variety.

Oh this was just a stealth thread to whine about the SMN rework, I regret looking in here.

Didn't see anyone else say SMN and the other jobs mentioned were stronger candidates anyway. Guess it's the scion death hysteria all over again.

[Payadopa]

I think they're all pretty shallow, honestly.

[remiff]

The Dev's blatant favortism of WAR, and the WAR playerbase's endless screeching basically lead to it being the omni-job of all content and the tank thats the best at literally everything, while having access to literally everything.
If it was actually designed like WAR players want to avoid homogenization we would have to remove a looot of skills from WAR to even the playing field.

Enhanced Equilibrium gave WAR a heal over time effect, when that was previously GNB's thing with Aurora
Hell you could argue Equilibrium is just Clemeancy except good because its a no cost ogcd
The less we say about PLD being the holy magic tank, losing in party healing to WAR's Nascent and Shake it Off + Overtime, the better
Bloodwhetting got a personal shield on it, when that was previously DRK's thing with TBN
DRK was the first tank to get a gap closer, yet now WAR is the one with 3 (debatably 4) gap closers compared to DRK's 2 and completely lackluster trait in Enhanced Unmend.

Its less of a "lets not homogenize the tanks" thing and more of a "WAR should literally be the best tank at basically everything" problem.

Yes, the current state of the Warrior is definitely one of the current balance issues in the game.

It has absolutely everything going for it, and its HP recovery makes no sense at all.

I hate play healers in dungeons with a Warrior because I feel like I hardly have to do anything, given how obscene their healing rates are,
in fact now, one Warrior and three DPS are enough to clear dungeons since the bosses do too little damage in every sense of the term, and the Warrior doesn't need healers at all.

[TheDustyOne]

Haven't read through all 8 pages, but from a quick glance I see a lot of Bard, so I'll avoid saying that.

I will say that I think WHM has it bad when it comes to in-game representation vs lore. Going from an elemental druid-like priest to holy priest in ShB, where only 2 of the 3 elements it represents being present at all in the kit pre-ShB, and overall just not caring about the elemental theme as you level.

If we're also going by old FF representation of WHM as well, then WHM is also lacking a lot of potential support and mitigation. We no longer have Protect and Shell and we can't buff via Faith, Bravery, or Haste. The mitigation we do have is locked behind longer cooldowns (and honestly not that great, the other healers run circles around WHM mitigation), and we have no party buffs at all. I get that the games current design won't be favourable to those particular spells, so I'm not asking for them to be back (or at least not as something spammable, Protect could possibly be a GCD with an additional cooldown attached similar to Macrocosmos that charges the blood lily).

[LilimoLimomo]

The Sultsworn is the collective name for the Paladins. Free Paladins came after (way way after) the creation of the Sultsworn and whilst they do not answer (necessarily) to the Sultana, they still represent the Sultana in their actions. This is why they take it seriously when a Paladin starts to defy their ideals, as it is a smear not only on them, but the Sultana as well.

I wanted to do my due diligence before dismissing your claim, and I'm glad I did because it helped me to understand why we both have different views on this: the game itself introduces paladins in a manner that is easy to misunderstand. In the very first Paladin quest, Jenlyns kind of says it both ways:

Jenlyns: A paladin swears allegiance to the sultanate. A paladin shall be the sword and shield of the sultanate. A paladin defends the people of the realm.

And then later in that same quest:

Jenlyns: A free paladin has no master. Instead he/she travels all lands, and in every place takes up the cause of the unarmed and defenseless. You swear fealty not to a lord, but to yourself─you are nobility amongst adventurers.

Since free paladins are something that Jenlyns literally just invented, I think the best wait to interpret his two "conflicting" claims is that in the former he was describing traditional paladins, while in the latter he was speaking specifically about the newer free paladins. Because there's simply no way that a free paladin can have no master, serve no lord, and simultaneously serve or represent the sultanate.

No, but you said (light) was their identity, which should come from the game.

With respect, I don't agree with that. If the game introduces a known archetype and doesn't defy my expectations with it, they don't need to explain it.

I also wouldn't say that light is their identity, though I can understand how you might have interpreted my initial statement that way since I did mix in some aesthetic bits in there; that's my bad.

No other Paladin's show any signs of using Light in anything, so this is a trait the WoL has picked up on their own, separate from the PLDs ingame.

According to the lore, job skills are learned from the job stone, meaning they would be something other paladins of equivalent level have access to.

And while I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the skills paladins in the game use, I do recall that Branden is able to use Clemency before he becomes a Warrior of Light. And while there are some differences between the exact skills jobs use between the Source and the First, we've never seen something so drastic as an entire element being removed or added.