FFXIV and Job Identity

[Zakuyia]

We need to play jeopardy with the devil.

What is job identity for 300,000 gil?

What is job uniqueness? For 1,000,000 gil.

[Carighan]

What is job identity for 300,000 gil?

What is job uniqueness? For 1,000,000 gil.

Not going to happen. And you could argue FFXIV never really had job uniqueness, only lore/animation/style identity but never gameplay identity derived from uniqueness. There were whispers of it, sure. But fundamentally the game doesn't want to engage with jobs that don't have a "fixed solution" (usually a static or quasi-static rotation), especially now that all CDs have been harmonized to 120s or to align with 120s.

Hence why saying "they're eroding job identity" is always a bit weird: Erode what, exactly? Sure, in a vacuum, looking at just this game, naturally having Sword and Shield oath was a stronger gameplay identity than not having them. Or... was it even? It wasn't like the idea was Paladin-unique. It wasn't like while the specifics differed (much like they do now) the overall concept mirrored between tanks, including the weird "dance" it elicited. And that dance was just busywork, there was a fixed solution as to when you wanted to be in what stance, with no player expression beyond "I could have done better". There wasn't "I did well because I did A" vs "I did well because I did B", the second was "I did badly because I did B", which you can still get easily just as well, as evident by all the data we can readily access about how players play (fflogs and such).

Job identity is... a tricky concept however. I don't think it can be lifted from other games and transplanted into FFXIV, given the combination of its age, the extreme button bloat and hence abilities to consider and reconsider and the vast number of classes instead of less classes coupled with specializations. There's just too much. FFXIV launched without any real job identity, and what little there was has been removed since ~late Stormblood. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all if all you have is an infected appendix, you remove it. A healthy one would be better, sure, but between none and infected, none is better.